How To Budget Your Digital Marketing Strategy In 2015

As the end of the year draws near, many of us are taking a look at our budget for the New Year. While often we are looking at ways to trim the fat, given our ever evolving technological age, we  must closely examine what types of digital meat needs to be added or re-evaluated.

We need a “mobile first” mentality when it comes to marketing today and how we do business in general. There are now more mobile, handheld devices on the planet than there are people, and that figure is rising at a rate

Start by Optimizing Your Website

If your website isn’t already mobile-friendly, that upgrade is long overdue. If your website is already viewable on mobile devices, is it truly optimized for mobile use?

Analyze your site from a handheld perspective and see what changes need to be made. Consider reducing lengthy content, text descriptions and larger images. Look at using larger fonts, buttons and links. Don’t just be seen on a mobile device, be viewed better, more efficiently and especially utilizing tools for engagement.

Going Mobile into 2015

Although we already recognize the importance of going mobile, it is also best to consider what types of strategies are best deployed for our business. Learn a little more about these different mobile marketing methods to mold your most effective strategy:

• SMS (Short Message Service) – a short four or five digit code used to connect you with mobile users and send them short content messages.

• MMS (Multimedia Message Service) – delivery of a timed slideshow of images, text, audio and/or video.

• Push Notifications – timely messages sent alerting customers about an event such as a clearance sale or availability of a new product

• App Based – adding an application that can engage your customer on their device with features such as purchasing or payments.

• Location Based Services – message sent according to the consumer’s location.

• In-Game Mobile Marketing – delivers ads to users engaged with free game play.

Before adding (or even deleting) these mobile methods to your marketing agenda, see what the competition is doing. Find a similar business or industry that has deployed a mobile program that is working successfully for them.

Multi-Channel Marketing

In order to boost our marketing strategies, we must understand that our audience is viewing us on a number of different devices, many different screens and most of them are smaller ones. It is also important to realize that multi-channel marketing uses a combination of indirect and direct communication channels – websites, retail stores, mail order catalogs, direct mail, email, mobile, etc. To succeed on these multiple levels, consider these three important factors:

1. Where your particular customer is doing business, how they locate and interact with you
2. Create a marketing strategy that covers those platforms
3. Establish a consistent customer service experience across these channels

When analyzing your marketing budget for 2015 and beyond, consider some things simply cannot be ignored, even if they are costly. If your marketing strategy is not designed to be used with the technology and trends in the twentieth century, then your business will become a part of the past rather than embracing the future.

Images: ”Diverse People in a Seminar About Digital Marketing/ Shutterstock.com“

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