The summer break is a great time to rest and recharge. And as a savvy business person, you will want to start the New Year with a bang to achieve the sales targets you have set.

Here are three simple questions to ask yourself (or your team), to maximise the opportunities that digital can provide to achieve those sales targets faster, or surpass them!

1. How important is digital to our business?

Almost everyone I meet says online is “very important” to their business, but unfortunately, not many businesses mean it seriously enough to allocate an appropriate budget to it.

As the old adage goes, you have to spend money to make money. This year, give online a decent budget (on average B2C businesses allocate 8-10% of their revenue on their marketing budget, and B2B businesses budget 6-9%).

But make sure you are clear on what results you expect from your investment – all digital marketing activity should work towards growing your revenue or improving your bottom line.

 

2. Does the team know what we want to achieve?

Not always! This is usually because the activity is undertaken without strategy. It’s really important to have a plan and understand what you’re trying to achieve from it:

  • What are your SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based) goals?
  • Who are your customers and where is the biggest opportunity for growth?
  • What marketing activities will be required to achieve the goals based on the customers and opportunity?
  • What are the priorities?
  • What is the timeline?

As business owners or managers, we know what we are spending and usually have some idea of what we are trying to achieve, but often we need help to work out the bits in the middle.

By answering the above list you will have a much clearer picture of what you need to do to achieve the goals.

3. What resources do I need to achieve our goals?

So much to do, so little time / budget / resource! The key skills you will need in your team to succeed in digital are:

  • Strategic planning
  • Design
  • Development
  • Content creation
  • Search engine marketing
  • Data analysis

Few businesses have the luxury of an internal team who are experienced in all of these skills. They may have had some exposure to this work, but when the senior management team is wanting to see results fast, and month after month, it can be hard for the marketing team to deliver on expectations.

There are three areas of digital marketing that are specialist areas and it pays to seek help with:

  1. Strategy / planning – what is the plan? The team needs a plan to focus their effort on activities that are going to achieve the goals in the fastest possible time.
  2. Technical – whether it’s coding, being found in Google, or driving traffic through Ads, the technical stuff is hard to get right if you’re not doing it day in, day out.
  3. Data – someone needs to keep a keen eye on what the data is telling us. What are we learning? Is all of this activity actually working? What should we stop doing? And what should we spend more on?

Getting specialist help on these activities is money well invested, especially if the aim is to move the company towards those sales targets the fastest.

In summary

  1. Properly allocate budget
  2. Set goals and make sure the whole team knows what they are
  3. Prioritise, nominate someone to own it and get started!

If you don’t know what to get started on, work with an agency to develop a digital strategy with a clear actionable roadmap.

This is the golden age of digital marketing. No-one is talking about digital marketing surpassing offline marketing any more. The switch to digital happened years ago. Now digital IS marketing.

Get on the bus this year!

Digital Marketing Partners Planning