Develop Digital Marketing With An Aim To Integrate Strategically

Yesterday an old friend called me and said he wanted to meet. The last time we met was more than fifteen years ago. After rejoicing in some of our old memories he told me that in 2019, motivated by the advancement of digital and online sales, sales managers who reported directly to him convinced him that the company needed a new website that delivers more than just being a static business page informing about the company, its activities, and its contact information. The world has changed to online selling and it’s about time that they too must embrace this technology. To make the story short, they appointed a web development company to develop the new website with integrated e-commerce along with a social media marketing plan. After tens of meetings with the company’s managers, training for the sales, diners with the executives, and 20K+ US Dollars they didn’t get any sales till now: Not a single sale in 2022, two and a half years after launching.

He is not the first person to suffer such consequences. However, he should not stay in the negativity bubble and someone has to pop it up. That, someone, was me, and I had to make him believe in himself first before asking him to believe in online stores in a later meeting. The problem with many businesses today is that they lack a marketing strategy that integrates inbound and outbound marketing altogether.

Doctor Dave Chaffey, the author of many books on marketing, among them “Digital Marketing Excellence” in its six editions, summarises the aim of Digital Marketing to simply support marketing goals and activities. In his book “Digital Marketing, Strategy, Implementation and Practice“,  he simply defines digital marketing as: “Achieving marketing objectives through applying digital technologies and media“. In such a marketing context, Chaffey developed an omnichannel marketing planning framework summarizing goals activities and measures that he called RACE. RACE stands for Reach, Act, Convert, Engage. The framework is quite interesting to learn and apply along with the plan in constituting the marketing strategy. However, what would be significantly meaningful for the second step after comforting and supporting my old friend to regain confidence in himself is to start telling him about Reach in Professor Chaffey’s framework and that is to build an audience before starting to think of conversion and a good way is to start by building relationships between the audience and the company through inbound marketing.