Digital marketing strategy is becoming more important with every passing day as the number of users using digital channels is increasing and advertising is becoming more mature. A good example in the last couple of years is the advent of native advertising and programmatic media. We should never talk about one given marketing strategy in isolation but look at the whole customer omnichannel experience for a brand.

The buzzword in the market for that is ‘customer experience’, which is defined as adding ‘brand experience’ to the ‘user experience’. The brand experience entails quite a few elements that are not part of the current marketing teams like a call center, branch visits, product experience itself, and so on. In essence, any strategy – digital, social or offline –needs to start by looking at the holistic approach to the customer experience of a brand.

In this region, digital accounts for 10 to 20 percent of the overall marketing budget of a brand. Quite a few times, the digital strategy is adopted from the offline strategy. This is an uphill battle for the digital marketing manager who needs to convince the chief marketing officer to allocate more budgets for digital. Numbers don’t lie and if spent efficiently, digital will outperform traditional media in most of the sectors. Don’t forget millennials are comfortable using technology and are very influential spenders. To devise a good digital strategy; one should be careful about some of the pitfalls.

Do not drive traffic to non-optimized pages and non-incentivized activations

Firstly, think brand assets. An effective digital strategy will start from the brand assets that the customer will experience; whether these are landing pages, a website, a Facebook activation or a mobile application. The first priority of the brand should be spent building a good digital experience; ensuring it appeals to their buyer personas. Ensure your brand assets are depicting your brand promise.

Do not commit to spending everything at the year’s beginning

You should always have a portion of your digital budget allocated to do something radical for the year, and try to pick a moment that is already trending. Do not commit to spending everything at the year’s beginning as technology and trends are changing quite fast and you should have the flexibility to move at a moment’s notice to capitalize on a wave.

Do not internalize the execution of your digital strategy

Think extended team. Use your internal resources to strategize at a higher level than simply executing marketing campaigns. Agencies can afford to keep experts in different areas because of economies of scale.

Do not just collect information and data

Fourthly, think data. Some of the marketing spend is always spent in a non-optimized manner. The important thing is to learn from it and optimize the spend. There are two areas that need to be considered: the platforms that you use to bring traffic and engagement and the brand asset itself. While analytics provide good insights, experts need to look at the reports to recommend changes to information architecture and conversion optimization. And obliviously, the marketing channels need to be closely monitored to ensure right target audience is being brought in. Search brings in active seekers while social brings in engagement. Think of what is important and act accordingly.

Do not create dreary content

Fifth, think content. Create good quality content. Provide value to your customers. Consider investing significant sums this year in establishing a strong research and content team to generate articles, infographics and short animated videos for clients because this is what the customer is engaging with.

Do not invest in wrong partners

Lastly, think execution. Go with agencies that have local talent and a proven track record of success. Mo matter how good your strategy is; you need a strong execution partner. Check how many technical resources the agency has; check the creative team; check other talent that is required to execute your strategy and if your agency is outsourcing ask them to be transparent. If your agency didn’t invest in HTML5 banners team late last year; the chances are all your marketing campaigns were delayed. Invest in building your ecosystem of agencies that are agile and flexible to the changing requirements of digital.