With digital marketing budgets projected to increase to 35% of total budgets over the course of the next year, mobile growing ever stronger, and wearables actually on the horizon, digital marketing is more important in 2015 than ever before. And knowing what to prioritize in digital is essential for every business, entrepreneur, and marketer.
The biggest challenge in digital marketing for many businesses is that most marketers think of digital as “the thing,” rather than “a part of the thing.”
Certainly, digital marketing provides enormous benefits and value, often for a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing strategies and mechanisms. However, the challenge of marketers is to see digital marketing for what it is: just one tool in the toolbox, or, more accurately, a bunch of tools within the marketing toolbox.
The priority for 2015 for digital marketers and business owners should be in determining just how to leverage digital marketing tools in the right configuration for each individual business, with just the right mix of paid and organic media. That means looking at retargeting, remarketing, paid advertising and video marketing, content marketing, social, and search engine optimization and marketing.
Related Class: How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy & Framework
Determining the “recipe” of just which digital marketing strategies and tools are useful for an individual brand is not an easy task, but should be the priority for results-oriented, metrics-driven brands that want to maximize their investment in digital marketing as a part of an overall marketing strategy, and should be guided by the target market and their behavior in the digital world.
This idea should not be news to marketers—designing marketing strategy to reach the target market has always been best practice—but because there are so many “everybody has to have X” messages in digital marketing, even the best marketers can get sucked into the next “shiny object” and forget the fundamentals.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s fine to experiment. In fact, I actually recommend to most of my clients that they allot a percentage of their budgets to experimenting with new strategies to see what tools yield the strongest results. Experimentation is critical for successful marketing campaigns in a world where the one constant is change.
Related Class: Demand Generation - Defining Your Target Market
So in 2015, with more digital marketing opportunities available than ever, the top priority for entrepreneurs, marketers, and businesses will be to remember that every one of these digital marketing strategies is just one more tool in the toolbox, and to assess whether each new tool fits well into the existing marketing campaign and will actually reach the target market.