A great digital marketing strategy fosters high levels of customer engagement and interaction with your brand throughout the customer journey. It also enables you to collect data that is essential to achieving your strategic goals. Are you effectively leveraging your mobile capabilities, social media, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence as you head into 2017? Here are four indicators that your digital marketing is hitting the mark:

Optimized Touchpoints

Digital touchpoints are like guideposts along the customer journey. They provide a great opportunity for your brand to make positive impressions on your customers while enabling you to gather actionable information that clues you in to where your customers are in their journey.

Using marketing automation, you can respond to customer interactions like purchases, clicks, or email opens. By collecting touchpoint data on customer preferences, you can steer your customers in the best direction based on their actual or predicted behaviors. Touchpoints enable you to plan for and respond to events that happen along the customer journey to ensure that your digital marketing supports your strategic goals.

Unified Customer Experience

Aligning your digital marketing strategy across all channels and business functions creates a cohesive customer experience as you onboard, engage, sell, and support your customers. Connecting so many moving parts of the customer journey on a large scale can be complicated and expensive, but marketing automation offers an efficient way to simplify.

Customers have unique preferences when it comes to how they engage with your brand. By incorporating sales and service directly into the customer experience via email, SMS, push notifications, ads, the internet, and various apps, you can meet them wherever they are in their customer journey.

Nestle Waters is a great example. With customers all over the world, Nestle Waters manages content marketing and e-commerce through social engagement. Their integrative digital marketing strategy transcends marketing and sales, allowing them to create a customer experience and nurture relationships across all their brands and business functions.

Automated Customer Interactions

Marketing automation enables you to give each of your customers an individualized journey, even on a massive scale. Automated personalization lets you save time by building one strategy that is replicated automatically, while you direct your energy and attention to expanding your business.

Automation is essential to creating reflexive 1-to-1 journeys for an array of customers. With the appropriate marketing automation tool, customer behavior drives the interactions with your brand. You can deliver a basic or intricate journey with relevant content at any scale thanks to predictive recommendations.

Life Time Fitness has netted a 154% ROI since its implementation of a multichannel customer experience that uses marketing personalization to generate communications based on member data. With myriad fitness goals among its varied membership, Life Time takes advantage of automated personalization to communicate different information to clients engaged in individualized customer journeys.

Measurable Impact

Your strategic goals span the entire enterprise, and it's essential to evaluate how events on the customer journey relate to their outcome. By developing your digital marketing strategy in accordance with measurable milestones on the customer journey, you can quantify results and adjust your plan as you move toward your goals.

Setting specific goals and measuring every interaction allows you to gauge your digital marketing progress with accuracy and ease. Analyzing the effectiveness at each juncture of the customer journey keeps you agile with your strategy. When you have data that shows you when to change course, you can optimize results as your customers develop.

Effective Digital Marketing Supports Growth

Customer engagement and brand interaction are powerful results drivers in the digital marketing age. An effective digital marketing strategy enables you to capture customer journey insights that pave the pathway to your strategic goals. When you employ a digital marketing strategy that optimizes touchpoint data, personalizes your customer experience, and creates value for your customers, you can grow your business and your bottom line.

For more digital marketing strategy tips, download State of the Connected Customer.