You may have great ideas about your layout. You may have had a vision for some time. But, professionals start with extensive research into what digital users like, prefer, and actually use. You build a strategy on what people visit, what takes them there, and what time of day or week they are most likely to connect. If your site does not match their browsing habits, the appearance is secondary.

A digital strategy will follow research into keywords and the traffic they generate. If you have an existing site, you must investigate what is working in terms of number of visits, length of stay, and click-throughs. Your new or revised website must be readable and navigable enough to attract and retain prospects long enough to make purchasing choices and closes.

But, there’s more to shaping a strategy. Each element of the site—the language, pictures, tabs, and more—require coding to optimize performance across devices with different screen size and operating systems. If all these widgets and links are supposed to deliver customers, you need to work on a strategic pre-plan.

• Goals: An effective digital marketing plan achieves your B2B goals. But, that means requires establishing clear goals. For instance, one goal might be to build brand awareness, an approach that might serve new businesses or brands. Another goal might seek additional sales, but that increase could be in volume or revenue. Other sales goals might target seasonal products or services or increases in sales of specific inventories. Yet another goal would seek customer satisfaction and referrals. Satisfied customers serve a best source of future sales, but their feedback can also improve your understanding of customer needs, timing, and needs-to-improve.
• Innovation: A unique website pulls interested parties, but gratuitous innovation risks customer loss. Users seek visual engagement, easy navigation, and interesting copy. So, staying current with evolving technology should not get ahead of customer taste.
• Teamwork: A value-added digital marketing strategy must be dynamic and self-perpetuating because it the supporting technology changes so quickly. But, keeping it current and effective takes too much time and specialty skills for marketing executives. So, planning necessarily devolves to structured and focused team of talented, knowledgeable, and committed in-house partners. Your best bet is to select and organize the team in collaboration with your advising agency to match talents with needs and develop an on-going relationship.
• Talent: Everyone has some interest in digital marketing. For too many of them, this interest is an avocation, not as their vocation. Forming your team takes deliberation. You should not load the team with interested executives because, while they may be strong on opinions, they lack the deep tech experience to deliver. But, this is an opportunity to identify the high potential staff best suited for the task. With advice from your digital marketing pros, you can form teams with the personnel assets suited by experience, skills, and interest.
• Build: Digital marketing broker the back of traditional marketing. It’s not enough anymore to place billboards, ads, or images. The internet allows such speed in searching, researching, and decision-making that your strategy must focus on engaging prospects, prompting decisions, and building relationships. The emphasis has shifted from image recognition to sales conversion thanks to a strategy that seeks to invite and enable interaction.

The strategy described here is a process that begins before locating and interviewing possible digital marketing providers.

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