Marketing was never considered easy, but all these technological advancements in the digital age made it a lot tougher. Traditionally, a marketer’s life  was much easier. The most complicated platform they had to master was the television, other marketing channels included newspapers and radio stations. Reaching your audience was easy, all it took to launch and move a product was the creation of an attractive and compelling message.

Establishing a business today no longer revolves around the investment of money. Without utilizing the right digital marketing strategies it is unfeasible to expand your business and generate more profit. Using strategies that are suitable for the digital age, as well as the right promotional methods will fuel your business expansion.

We are required to integrate and efficiently utilize a brand new array of skills, aptitudes, and competences in order to engage customers in this digital age. Therefore it is very easy to get lost in the process as it is all relatively new to us, here are 4 principles to guide you through your digital marketing journey:

1. Clarify business intentions

In our marketing day and age, both big and small marketers seem to be struggling to keep up with new trends and strategies. The whole world is crumbling to the pressure of becoming successful, progressive and including elements of up and coming media in their marketing agendas.

The only method of judging a marketing strategy effectively is to examine whether or not it is achieving the organization’s major marketing goals, and not by how many “modern” or “digital” features are integrated into it. This is precisely why defining your intention is crucial to whether your business succeeds or fails.

2. Recognise, appraise, and initiate emerging opportunities by utilising innovation teams

In order to create and integrate a marketing opportunity into the daily marketing agenda, the opportunity’s potential must first be tested and evaluated. Marketers can’t be expected to stay on top of all new emerging trends and technologies, specifically because most of these new tactics will go to waste.

It is therefore crucial to have an innovative team to run tests and conclude whether or not an opportunity is useful. Most opportunities will never be utilized, but the ones found to be effective could be a game changer for the business.

If an opportunity passes all the tests and is deemed suitable for the business, it is then further developed and included in the strategic process as a feasible approach to generate sales and increase awareness.

3. Disassociate strategy and innovation in marketing

Strategy and innovation don’t go hand-in-hand, they are profoundly different.

A good strategy is one that efficiently achieves the set objectives. Whereas innovation revolves around the creation of something new and different. Unfortunately, as standard solutions, new things tend to fail.

Combining these 2 elements could lead to mismanagement within the organization as combining all the tasks will complicate things for both investors and new marketers. As per these reasons, when a business approaches innovation they tend to put their best people on it, as they’ve previously attained results. So you will regularly find that the majority of these groups are formed by directors and senior executives.

This is done because firms think they are eliminating the chance of failure from their innovative plan. In most cases that might work, but when dealing with innovation, the possibility of failure will not cease to exist.

4. Make open assets available on the marketplace

Acquiring the customer’s attention and generating awareness through exciting advertising campaigns used to be the main elements and focus of most marketing promotions and campaigns, customer awareness was the most crucial step of a marketing campaign.

Sales are no longer generated through promotional campaigns. Today, a promotional campaign is likely to result in an internet search rather than a sale, that specific internet search is then targeted by competitors. Only building awareness instead of being proactive is more likely to benefit your competitors than yourself.

To grow your customer base in the digital age, you must aim to inspire them, to purchase, to participate. Brands have shifted into communities where people attain a feeling of wholeness and purpose when interacting with your brand, they are no longer viewed as just assets in the world.

Interested in learning more? View the Online MBA in Marketing or Speak to a Higher Education Consultant for a consultation.