A landing page is typically developed for the purpose of a campaign-specific destination. A unique domain or friendly URL are part of the advertising that directs the user to find out more about the company, product or service being promoted. This allows marketers the ability to gauge the interest created by the advertising elements.

A website is the core digital asset your company develops. It is an organic sales asset that grows and changes to the needs of the marketing and sales teams. Like a plant, it needs regularly pruning and care to keep it optimized. Unlike personnel, a website works 24/7/365 and should be leveraged to build business non-stop.

An eCommerce site is more ideal than a regular website. Transacting business online is far more effective and efficient. It provides immediate sales, rich customer data, shopping habits, a trackable marketing and sales funnel and the most reliable form of Return on Investment calculations.

Promo landing pages and sites are perfect for capturing customer information. Contests, sweepstakes and other promotional tactics drive users to these types of pages for the very purpose of a value exchange, providing you customer data you can use to cultivate the relationship.

A Value Exchange is required when you want to gain information on the user of your digital property. Typically, a form is presented to capture that information prior to granting access to a particular section or specific content on your web property. Getting user data is tough because we all hold onto it so tightly. But given the right value exchange, users are typically open to serving up limited information. 

Lead Forms are very similar to value exchanges, except that you aren't giving anything up in return. These tend to be simply Contact Us forms or Technical Inquiry forms. Users are raising their hand and providing their information so you can follow up and convert the lead to a sale. If you use a lead form(s), it is critical you have a workflow that ensures someone from your organization is following up efficiently and effectively.

Use a Corporate Blog/Vlog to expand your digital content base. The content should convey your product and industry expertise and provide more fodder for SEO. Blogs can house written, audio and video (Vlog) content. When sculpted for SEO, the content will attract qualified prospects organically and act as a destination for the longer form of your social network activity.

Deploying Social Accounts – aka "social media" or "social marketing" – is the hot tactic right now. Deploying your social marketing correctly is a vital digital tactic. The correct accounts. The correct content. The correct engagement. It can be a bit overwhelming if not deployed with discipline and proper understanding of the results an organization can expect. 

Mobile Apps and/or Web-Based Apps are critical assets to maintain digital customer retention. While most prospects may be hesitant to engage with an app, customers are seeking ways to make doing busy with you easier. There are many functions in your organization that may be candidates to become apps.

Customer Relations Management (CRM) systems are fairly common now, but they vary in effectiveness from one organization to the next because data input is rarely well organized. If you haven't implemented a CRM, do so with proper guidance. It can quickly become an expensive platform.

A Customer Knowledge Base is an FAQ section on steroids. If you have a product or service that invites frequent user questions, a digital knowledge base is great for business! Internal groups must maintain the content, but the resources required to do so are far less than fielding the same questions over and over again through chat, phone or email. And external audiences love it because the answers are at their fingertips. Just ensure your digital knowledge base is easy to use and quick to search.

If your product or service requires user adoption, a Help Desk or Technical Ticketing System is ideal. Users can ask questions inline with using your product, and yet customer service representatives can serve up researched answers in an organized and timely fashion.

Marketing Systems are a general way to describe platforms that offer drip, automated and triggered marketing. You have heard of HubSpot, Marketo and Salesforce for example. Each varies greatly in functionality and finding the right one for you depends a lot on your digital marketing efforts.

We all have Financial Systems. But did you know many are hosted on the cloud and offer API integration? The digital business of the future will be able to track the entire customer path, including financial returns on the marketing efforts directed at each prospect. It may be time for you to consider a new financial system if yours isn't already capable of talking to your other systems.

Along with financial systems, ERP/Operations Systems will be the last systems to integrate into marketing and give us a single view of the customer. From inventory management to picking and order entry, these systems should eventually integrate to provide the big picture of the prospect-to-customer-to-repeat customer cycle!

You have reached nirvana! All your systems talk to one another and you should be seeing a very good snapshot / single view of the customer!

The only part of your system that may not be integrated is the Financial one. Work hard to finish this last piece. It may be the most difficult, but it will definitely be worth it when you become a TRUE digital business!

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) occurs whenever you create a digital property. While missed by many, it is foundational to a great digital marketing strategy. An agency who understands digital understands that SEO is part science (writing for the bots) and part art (writing/selling to the audience to create action).

Your Google Business Listing is akin to the Yellow Page ad of the past. The process is very simple and quick. Listing your information on Google Business means your map location(s), business information, images, reputation and more are present in the multitude of ways Google serves up businesses on the web. Don't forget this Web-101 tactic.

If your digital properties use Google Analytics, you're on the right path. If you want your business to thrive, you'll want to start reviewing and drawing conclusions from those analytics. Basic Google Analytic installations are a super start, but consider setting up and tracking Events, Funnels and Goals to make finding meaningful data quicker.

Paid Search picks up where SEO leaves off. Sculpting every page of your digital property for SEO is still critical because it benefits your Paid Search efforts. But building page rank can take time, and if you don't have that time, Paid Search (e.g., Google AdWords) is an immediate way to auction for the top few positions in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Email Marketing remains one of the top digital marketing tactics you can deploy. Despite new channels in digital marketing, the highest response rates and sales continue to come from email campaigns. Things to consider: effective architecture, responsive design, trackable analytics and integration with a CRM.

Banner Ads, when used for brand-building, are a great digital marketing tactic. They are used less frequently now because marketers expect higher click-thru rates. But most banner advertising happens in the context of relevant content, not direct marketing channels. If you accept brand-building as a vital tactic, banner ads can be highly effective in display or remarketing channels. Compared to print display advertising, digital platforms offer better geo-, demo- and psychographic targeting.

Article marketing is one of oldest forms of content marketing. It has its root in Public Relations and is designed to win and retain mindshare by keeping your differentiated idea in front of your audiences. The key? Differentiated content...not what everyone is serving up. Distribution of your articles can take various forms but usually lands on third-party platforms versus your own (see blogging/vlogging).

Case Studies/White Papers are simply an extended form of article marketing. Case studies focus on success in implementing your product or service with a specific client, industry or application. White Papers are like college research papers but applicable to the real world of business. Both can build your differentiated brand by sharing your unique expertise.

Pinterest isn't right for every business or organization. When is it right? When your content (images with short copy) is uniquely inspirational. Pinterest is used as an idea-generator and/or as a project how-to. Can your content fit into this end use?

Despite all the hype around social media, email marketing and eNewsletters continue to reap the most engagement and ultimate transactions. If you feel you are ready for article marketing, chances are the email distribution will be an easy add-on.

If you have the chops and capacity to do video, do it! YouTube/Vimeo are the most common video-sharing platforms and they do it really well. But video is coming on in all areas such as Facebook Live, Vine and others. If you aren't doing Video now, start thinking how you might start.

LinkedIn is the best way to grow your talent pool. It's the ultimate job networking area, but few people "buy" goods and services thru it. Consider LinkedIn a personal brand-building tool your business can connect with for new talent.

Blogging/Vlogging is not too different from article marketing, with the exception that blogs/vlogs are typically hosted locally rather than distributed digitally thru other platforms. It also acts as a great way to expand your SEO reach.

Did you know News Releases can now be distributed without the editor as the gatekeeper? While the fee isn't free, circulating your news online (e.g., via Yahoo! and Google) doesn't require editors who choose what prints. It all publishes as you write it when you distribute your news on line. This applies to Investor Relations as well.

Reputation Management is one of the "new kids on the block." With the massive amounts of information that can posted on your company, it's important to manage that reputation if reviews greatly impact your business. These can be product and service reviews or cultural reviews where employment is concerned. Influencer Engagement is about promoting your reputation with digital readerships such as popular bloggers or social phenoms.

If you use a CRM, then Lead Scoring may be one of the next tactics you want to deploy. Instead of passing every contact from your marketing into your CRM, many companies choose to qualify leads by scoring them through website visits, source of leads and data cleansing.

Don't end your social engagement with social posting. Social Advertising is a sometimes great way to target consumers in a very granular way because the demo-, geo- and psychographic filtering available on a social advertising platform is unequaled. But don't expect great click-thru rates. Social Advertising is truly about brand-building!

Profiling is a wonderful way to lead score if you have developed personas within your digital assets. By profiling, you can turn a casual site visitor to a warm lead by identifying a user based on common navigation patterns. From there, you can display specific content and gather user information.

Video Advertising may be the next hot media. While is remains on most media planners radar, video advertising may soon become hot due to the on-request video content consumers are demanding. Pre-, mid- and post-roll video ads sponsor online content that has targeting methods built in.

As we gain the ultimate single view of the customer, the customer will expect marketing to speak more specifically to them. Affinity programs will no longer suffice. With the power of data, customers will expect we know who they are and what they want. Personalized Content is one way to offer it to them.

Like personalized content, Dynamic Content is based on what you can learn about a user before they ever engage with you. With Profiling and Lead Scoring, content should appear dynamically based on what you can guess about a user. It's only one tick from personalized content.

While big data should tell us what customers want, marketing still deals with the illogical brain. So when you don't know... TEST! A/B Testing is a great way to learn the effectiveness of your message and what does a better job of converting prospects to customers!

You know you've arrived as a digital business when you can put some of your marketing on auto-pilot. Be careful because the human mind is still illogical. Don't set it and forget it. But at least if you are at this point, you can set some level of Marketing Automation. Congratulations!

If you really know your customer — and we mean REALLY — then Trigger Campaigns are a sub-set of marketing automation. These can be set based on events that happen during the lifecycle of your customer, or events in the LIFE of your customer (think Birthdays, Anniversaries, Oil Changes and more).

Imagine presenting to your CEO or Board and telling them you've conquered Big Data. If you are at this point, you may want to run for President of the Universe!