5 Reasons Why You Need an Online Marketing Strategy

If online marketing is an important part of your business promotion and you plan to use online channels like Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, Social Media and Search Engine Optimisation, then you need an online marketing strategy.

In fact, most businesses now have an online presence, however not many have an online marketing strategy. Business owners give many reasons for this including:

• Little experience creating an online marketing strategy
• No time to create and manage one
• Not necessary – I have it all in my head

However, for businesses that have implemented an online strategy, the results have been amazing. They have realised how easy it is to create one and that it takes a little of their time each month to update it.
Here are some of the benefits you will realise from creating an online marketing strategy:

Keeps You Focused

A plan keeps you focused on what needs to be done and by when. Because you will have goals you want to achieve, you will work on only those tactics that you’ve identified as necessary to achieving your goals.
You will now be more focused on meeting the needs of your customers because you will have identified who they are and what their wants and needs are.

Improves Performance

With clear objectives and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to benchmark your progress, you will be much closer to improving the performance of your online campaigns. You will also benchmark against your competitors for your important metrics such as sales (conversions), time on site, number of pages visited, bounce rate and many others.

With this data, you can work more efficiently to improve your ads, campaigns and all your online activities.

More Efficient and Effective

An online marketing strategy makes you more cost efficient on platforms like Google Adwords because you focus on improving the targeting of your campaigns, improving quality scores and click through rate and it reduces your Cost Per Click (CPC) rate.

Your ads also become more effective at targeting the right audience and this is reflected in Click Through Rates (CTR) which will continue to increase. Your strategy will help you to focus on the activities that you need to work on to increase efficiency and effectiveness.

Improves Revenue and Profitability

With better targeted campaigns and a clearer online focus, this will lead to an improvement in revenue and even more importantly, profitability. Also, you will have more money to add to your online marketing budget so you can be more represented on a wide range of channels and devices.

The importance of this is that people now use a wide range of devices and channels to search, browse, shop on the internet and the more you are represented on these, the more sales and revenue you will have.

Creates Unity

Your online marketing strategy will help you to create more unity in your marketing team with your marketers, content writers, copywriters, designers and researchers, whether they are in-house, an agency or freelancers.

By sharing your strategy and agreeing on objectives and which markets to target, everyone will be on the same page and you will see greater unity in the team. This has many benefits including

• More satisfied customers
• Happier staff members
• Greater profitability
• Efficient use of time and money resources

Summary

There are many benefits to creating an online marketing strategy beyond the five that I’ve just listed here. It’s important that you work closely with your team to create and launch one to enhance your online business. Use the template below to get you started.

Download the free online marketing strategy template to plan your online marketing campaigns.