Month: March 2022

Digital marketing: why does your business need it?

Posted on by Gabriella Massara

Why should you implement a digital marketing strategy for your business?

If you’ve opened this article, you’re probably wondering why your business needs a digital marketing strategy.

What benefits can be derived from it? When you already have a good traditional marketing strategy, is it essential to replicate it on the web?

The answer to these questions is very simple: traditional offline marketing is no longer enough.

This obviously does not imply an abandonment of all marketing strategies that are not digital! Rather, it requires a change in perspective, as well as the realization that, to do good marketing, both approaches (digital and non-digital) are necessary.

Today, a promotional campaign that takes advantage of the full potential of digital can make the difference

When we talk about digital marketing, we refer to an approach that acts on several levels and with different tools, using digital technologies.

A respectable digital marketing strategy is based on the creation of valuable content for your target audience and on the positioning activities of the company in order to make it more visible on the web: from the copy on your e-commerce, to the sponsorship activities on social networks.

After defining the short- and long-term goals of the strategy, you will outline the activities needed to achieve them, which span several areas, each of which is essential.

Whatever the goal, from Brand awareness to site conversion, you will rely on these practices:

  1. Search engine optimization (SEO) to increase organic traffic and rankings for the keywords your site needs;
  2. Search engine marketing (SEM): paid promotion activities that are based on the user’s search intent;
  3. Content marketing: creation of valuable persuasive content that draws interest, attracts and drives the customer to the desired action;
  4. Social Media Marketing (SMM) and Social Pay-per-click advertising (PPC): online content promotion activities via social media and paid advertising.

These macro activities will be complemented by ad hoc strategies of affiliate marketing, email marketing (DEM and Newsletter), influencer marketing, digital PR, community management, digital customer care.

Your customer-centric marketing strategy

The terrain of digital marketing is considerably more complex than that of traditional marketing.

Nowadays being present on the web is everything. This is not only because much of your marketing efforts have moved online, but because your competitors have too!

Yes, in spite of all your efforts and commitment to make your product as good as possible, some other product, maybe with a lower quality than yours, got the better of you just because it was sponsored on the web!

Did I guess right? If the answer is yes, fear not, the solution you are looking for is much closer than you imagine, but more importantly, it may not be the one you imagine! By this I mean not that the quality of the product is not important, but that it is not the only factor to consider.

Product is not everything!

Digital marketing allows for the formation of a network of contacts with two-way communication flows. What makes your potential customer become real is the way you make them feel.

Instead of focusing exclusively on the product, a digital marketing strategy also focuses on another element that is as important as it is often overlooked: people.

This approach, which is based on listening to the needs and desires of the customer, allows companies and their target audience to establish a dialogue resulting in full satisfaction for both.

The benefits are many: tapping into customer desires can help you create a targeted campaign with a high probability of achieving your goal. People appreciate a type of offer that seems tailor-made for them, and they respond to this interest with their brand loyalty.

Having gained loyalty, the customer will be inclined not only to rely on you in the future, but also to become a testimonial for your products, even going so far as to influence those in their closest circle.

Is digital marketing the future for SMEs?

The answer to this question is absolutely to be found in Big Data!

Every user constantly produces a large amount of behavioral data that should not be overlooked: analyzing the flow of data coming from those who buy a product, in fact, can tell us a lot about people, building models that predict their behavior.

  • What are your user’s preferences?
  • How old is he/she?
  • How does he/she like to spend his/her free time?
  • What are his/her values?
  • What is his/her job?
  • What are his/her goals?
  • What worries him/her the most?

A digital marketing strategy allows for immediate feedback and monitoring of an ongoing campaign.

There are many aspects to consider, as there are many skills needed.

What’s the first step in starting your digital marketing strategy?

Relying on an agency to take care of your marketing strategy can bring countless benefits.

Not all agencies guarantee the same results. How do you choose the one that best suits your needs, without neglecting any aspect?

A multi-disciplinary approach that ensures growth from a variety of perspectives is critical. In short, what you really need is a specialist who has an overview. Someone who can manage a digital promotional campaign from every aspect.

The right professional for you, therefore, has a wide variety of skills, ranging from SEO to social media management, online digital PR to SEM, direct email marketing, pay-per-click advertising (PPC), funneling, data analytics and more. These are just a few of the fundamental skills for a digital marketing specialist.

To all this knowledge will be added those necessary to coordinate the marketing department with all the others that make up the company, in order to develop a marketing strategy that is as complete as possible and that, above all, combines perfectly with the work of each area.

How to choose the right Web Agency for you?

Choosing the best option is not always so simple and obvious, unfortunately. It often happens, in fact, to rely on marketers with a sectoral knowledge, not able to cope with the complexity of factors in a company.

A Growth Agency is right for you because while it creates the right digital marketing strategy, it monitors and takes care of the overall health of your business.

The approach adopted by a self-respecting Growth Agency is Data Driven: it is based on the analysis of the data flow, elaborating, depending on the results obtained, a strategy based on concrete facts rather than mere opinions that may have no connection with the real state of things.

A Growth Agency, moreover, while identifying any critical issues of your company, develops and implements a growth strategy aimed at eliminating problems and highlighting the strengths of your business. Before developing it, however, offers support in the analysis of your target market, intercepting the best strategy to be implemented to reach it and optimize the result.

Your business needs a digital marketing strategy, but it also needs experienced hands that know how to best implement it.

Are you still pondering? Contact us, let’s write the recipe for your success together!

The 3 Components of Digital Transformation

Posted on by Sergio Serafini

Has your company really begun a Digital Transformation process?

We talked in the previous article about What Digital Transformation is (and what it is not). A little introduction to the topic was necessary, so that starting with this article, we can go into more depth and understand what the 3 components of digital transformation are.

But who is the term Digital Transformation creditable to and when did it originate?

Some sources on the web, claim with fair conviction, that the reference year is the end of 2011 and the attribution seems to go unequivocally to the consulting company CapGemini in collaboration with the MIT Center for Digital Business.

Let’s start with the definition that the researchers of the aforementioned organizations gave and that is still particularly interesting today:

” Digital transformation involves the use of technology to radically improve the performance or the reach of businesses.“

This definition is particularly interesting to understand how, as usual, in Italy and in most of Europe we haven’t understood a f*** thing!

Indeed, many companies have interpreted the digital transformation process over the years by equipping their employees with mobile devices or simply creating cloud infrastructures to store their files.

It would consequently be very easy for me to say that this is not digital transformation, but let’s try to be concrete. How do we know if we have actually started a digital transformation process and if we are going in the right direction?  

The 3 Components of Digital Transformation

There are three measures and indicators of digital transformation in the recent literature that are commonly referred to as the 3 components of digital transformation:

  1. The processes
  2. The operations
  3. The relation with the customers

Transformation of the processes

Let’s start with the first point. I always have questions when I visit companies where employees still rely on paper, pen and file cabinets. Or in other companies, within which people communicate via email and cell phones. 

A successful digital transformation means implementing entirely new technology and processes. Sending a purchase order via email is not a new process; it’s simply a more modern way of doing something you’ve always done. Automating the submission of a purchase order, on the other hand, is.

It is because it saves time. Because you’ll be able to allocate your employees to other tasks. Because it will improve your business efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Transformation of operations

Let’s move on to the second point, those operations. I once approached a company that had a single supplier, not out of convenience but out of laziness. They called me and told me that the supplier was in trouble and had found themselves unprovided for, having no other business relationship.

What if they had had someone advise them early on that that business strategy was dangerous? What if they had implemented a system that automatically allowed them to track suppliers by individual product? What if they had automatically linked to their pricing list?

First of all, the entrepreneur would not be in trouble, having to resort to a new business contact on which there is no history.

He/she also wouldn’t have wasted time manually searching for other vendors, and let’s always remember: time is money.

Finally, it would have obtained higher margins from automated purchasing from the most convenient supplier at the time.

No more phone calls, wasted time or allocated resources. Automation of processes, certainty of agreements and independence of positioning.

Transformation of user experience

Let’s try to admit that in the first two points, with a dash of courage and a bit of luck in choosing the right consulting agency, it’s relatively easy to notice the impact of a digital transformation on your processes and operations. 

It gets more complicated when it comes to customer experience and satisfaction.

However, digital transformations have a enormously significant impact on how customers interact with your business and how they perceive those interactions. 

For example, have you ever wondered why you buy from Amazon? If you’re answering for the prices, you’re wrong. Amazon has prices today that are on average higher than the average competitor. You buy from Amazon because of the customer satisfaction, especially post-sale, that you have accumulated in the most negative experiences.

What happens, for example, when one of your customers doesn’t receive an order or wants to return it? If you have an automated system, in a few minutes the request will be completed and in a few seconds the final response will be packaged.

If you don’t have it, one of your employees will have to manually respond to the email and after hours will still not have solved the problem definitively, because they will have to wait and sort for example the tracking code.

The advantages of digital transformation for your business

Summarily analyzing the 3 components of Digital Transformation, we can say that embarking on a digital transformation journey offers 4 benefits:

  1. It increases the accuracy
  2. It improves the speed
  3. It reduces costs
  4. It makes your business more efficient

But if that’s the case, you can’t ignore talking about and making measurable RoI (return on investment. This is a step we’ll explore in one of the next articles. Because perhaps it is a representative indicator of how to apply digital transformation and how NOT to apply it.

Aloha!