Every company needs a well-defined marketing plan. Your goals should serve as a compass when it comes to defining a path for your digital strategy. That includes SEO, Social Media, UX… you name it.
Briefing your agency on who your target is, the market you operate in, your pricing strategy, as well as your medium-term plan (just to name a few), is not something that will make their lives easier: it is absolutely essential to crafting a digital marketing plan for your brand.
As a full-service digital agency, we don’t just need to ensure all areas we are helping you with are in sync – we need to make sure that they are in full synergy with your broader marketing plan.
A campaign that focuses on ad hoc actions can bring results; but working with a bigger picture will not only help us plan ahead but also to bring in new, relevant ideas and – all going well – leads. Once you bring in someone with fresh eyes, a range of possibilities that neither party could have foreseen will open up.
When it comes to optimising and maximising your options and resources, we are the authority. Our strength comes from understanding the digital sphere and how you can make the most out of it. But on a grander scale, no one knows your company better than you do.
Working together is of utmost importance in order to ensure campaigns have real substance. Every campaign should have a strong rationale behind it. If your marketing team can pull up data on relevant trends for your own business – whether that’s demographics, sales peaks, in-store campaigns that have proved efficient, … – that is going to help us craft better, more insightful digital marketing campaigns.
I’ll give you a couple of examples: whilst working with a client on an AdWords campaign, we began to wonder if the low volume of searches really was just due to the company being in a very niche market or if there was something we could be missing. That’s where the client’s expertise comes in.
After a chat with our client, we realised that – while our keywords were still relevant – a more adept user such as a scientist on a specific area would be searching the more technical keywords. In fact, this insight was provided by someone, not in the client’s in-house marketing team but, rather, one of their members of staff who had been tapped for insights, as per our request.
The moment we began to use more refined keywords we started attracting a whole new cluster of users. Their insights were fundamental in re-shaping the campaigns, tweaking them to reflect a market knowledge the company had but we were just missing out on due to, well.., not having a scientific background!
Now, knowing exactly what and how to use this terminology, we could start coaxing people in by taking advantage of newly published white papers on areas that some of the products they sold acted in. By obtaining a calendar of upcoming conferences they were going to be attending, we were also able to implement new campaigns and work on SEO around it. This tactic proved to be effective in bringing not only new leads through the website but also in meeting potential customers in person as they now knew where to find our client.
Most companies will already have this type of information at their disposal – what usually happens is that they sometimes fail to identify it as being relevant to our work as an agency. When clients allow us a peek at their marketing plan, new opportunities are found.
An SEO strategy, a social media strategy… They are not individual pieces of a different puzzle: they are an integrating part of a company’s marketing plan, and, therefore, of the whole company strategy. Being in possession of all pieces of the puzzle will bring in results for both ends.
By Irene Hislop
By Conor McCaffrey