An Introduction to the Digital Marketing System

If you’ve visited the SilverDisc website before, you may have noticed that we often talk about the “digital marketing system” or DMS. But what is a DMS, and more importantly, what is your DMS and why does it matter? We break it all down in this blog post.

What is the Digital Marketing System?

The DMS is the way SilverDisc approaches marketing for our clients. It’s an iterative process or cycle, in which we strategise, engineer, market and measure digital marketing with your goals in mind, and with your business at the centre of everything we do. It’s a holistic approach to digital marketing, and within it, different components work together to make your marketing a success.

What is Your Digital Marketing System?

Each DMS will be different according to your goals and how you intend to reach them. As such, your DMS may include your website, SEO, PPC, email marketing, a variety of social media marketing channels, or just some of these things. Whether you use SEO and email marketing or PPC and Facebook Ads, each part of your DMS should work together and be continually reviewed through this iterative process.

How Does the DMS work?

Take a look at the DMS diagram below:

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Your Goals

Everything starts with your business goals, and these are fed into our first step, which is to strategise. If you don’t have any goals yet, we can work together to set some SMART goals – goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound.

Strategise

Once we know your goals, we can form a strategy for meeting them. For example, if your goal is to deliver a certain amount of revenue online, where will your customers come from and how will you reach more of them? Which products are your best sellers and how can you build campaigns around them to promote them further? At this stage, we may consider whether PPC, SEO, social media, email marketing or any other strategies should be present in your DMS, and how it all fits together. Which channels would be best for reaching your customers, developing your brand, or reaching any goals you have set?

It is worth mentioning that some of these channels will filter into each other and by helping one along, you’ll be helping the other. For example, you may need to create a new landing page on your website to use in your Google Ads campaign. By ensuring this page has a good quality score and is relevant to the keywords you are targeting, you could also be improving your website’s SEO for this keyword – whether or not working on SEO was your original intention.

Engineer

Now that we know what you need to use to reach your goals, we need to do some technical engineering to set it all up. This may involve building a new website with added functionality, setting up feeds for shopping ads, or improving the features of your existing website. Before we can move on to marketing, it’s important that your website is in good shape. For example, if your content or checkout process needs an overhaul, it would be wasting money to drive traffic to your website without first doing some work on conversion rate optimisation (CRO).

Market

With everything set up, it’s time to begin digital marketing work – whether that’s running PPC ads, putting SEO tasks into action, or working on email marketing campaigns.

Measure

Once things are up and running, it’s important to keep monitoring and measuring. What’s working and what could be improved? This is where your goals come in again – are you on your way towards meeting them?

Strategise, Engineer, Market, Measure, Strategise, Engineer, Market, Measure...

And of course, as the DMS is an iterative cycle, measuring isn’t the end of it – on we continue, back to strategizing with our goals in mind. Now that we know whether what we’ve done so far is working, we can continue to improve on it to either try to meet our current goals or to set new ones.

Why is the DMS so important?

Your DMS is important because it’s unique to your business. It contains only the things that are important to you. Rather than cluttering up your plan – and wasting precious time and resources – with everything but the kitchen sink, the DMS can help you to focus on your goals and invest your efforts in what works for you. And one of the great things about the DMS is that because you’re constantly strategizing, engineering, marketing, measuring and referring to your goals, you will always know whether or not it’s working and you’ll always be proactively refining and improving your digital marketing presence.

Get in touch with SilverDisc to talk about what your DMS might look like and how we can help you to focus on the elements of digital marketing that will really help drive your business forward.