Why the Best Digital Marketing Strategies Don’t Follow a Template

Good businesses start with good ideas. Good, unique ideas extend beyond your business plan and product or service offering to your marketing efforts. You wouldn’t steal another company’s messaging, so why would you mimic their strategy? To put it simply, your business doesn’t follow a cookie cutter template, and neither should your digital marketing strategy. The best digital marketing strategies are customized to suit your business needs and your goals. What works for one organization would fail epically for another, and as much as digital marketers love trial and error, we don’t like utter failure. Here’s how we at Pyxl approach digital strategies with our clients.

There’s No Such Thing As Too Much Data.

At Pyxl, we begin every strategy process with a discovery period. We interview key stakeholders—holding phone-based or in-person meetings with decision-makers, project managers and subject experts. The aim here is to gather as much historical and anecdotal information as we can. What campaigns have worked well in the past? Which campaigns fell flat? What gets employees excited? What’s the overall vision for the company?

The next step is pulling in all the objective data that we can. Website and email analytics, keyword research, ad conversion rates, social media engagement rates–nothing is insignificant. Subjective information plus hard data helps us build a better understanding of your brand’s history and goals so we can better recommend tactics that will impact those goals.

It’s Not a One-Size-Fits-All World.

Each company or organization has its own unique challenges. In your business, you can probably identify, in your sleep, what areas need focused improvement and which areas you’re rocking. No two businesses are the same size, have the same problems or have the same goals. At Pyxl, we collaborate with our clients to craft strategies that solve specific needs and goals.

If you’ve studied inbound methodology at all, you know that there is a mix of activities that are seen as must-do’s. You must create content regularly, you must be active on social media, you must have emails with calls-to-action that lead to landing pages with forms that capture a lead’s contact information. The list is long, and always changing, so it’s often difficult for businesses to know where to focus their time and energy.

Marketing strategies are part science, part art.

And just like with art, you aren’t learning much if you’re simply copying another artist’s techniques and style. Each organization should approach marketing differently, and for a good reason. A B2B company may not have a huge social media following, so their strategy will need to focus on increasing followers, increasing engagement and running ads that penetrate beyond their existing following to reach a broader audience base. On the flip side, a popular ecommerce brand may have a huge social following and high engagement, so their social approach will need to be tailored towards responding quickly and appropriately to comments and reaching out to potential online influencers.

Strategies aren’t static.

Fun fact: Although digital marketing is constantly changing, digital strategies do have an expiration date. New technologies are made every day. Online habits shift and change. The biggest pitfall we see companies make is in thinking that their digital marketing strategy should stay the same year-over-year (and even, eeks, decade-over-decade).

Your digital marketing strategy should be a living, breathing document. We recommend a strategy refresh every 18 months. 12 months is a little too quick, whereas 18 months will allow you to see larger trends and better sync up with new technology and social platforms.

Not convinced you need to invest in a digital marketing strategy? Before you get too cozy with that decision, keep in mind 82% of shoppers research online before buying and in the B2B realm, 94% of buyers do online research for purchase decisions. If you want expert advice on how a digital strategy process can improve your marketing efforts, get in contact with us.

Updated: Apr 13, 2022