A survey done by Smart Insights , 46% of brands don’t have a defined digital marketing strategy, while 16% do have a strategy but haven’t yet integrated it into their marketing activity.
Thus, if you don’t have a digital marketing strategy in place how can you expect to grow and innovate, to measure meaningful results and to learn from past mistakes?
Why Your Company Needs Digital Marketing Strategy
1. Directionless
We find that companies without a digital marketing strategy (and many that do) don’t have clear strategic goals for what they want to achieve online in terms of gaining new customers or building deeper relationships with existing ones. And if you don’t have goals, you will likely don’t put enough resources to reach the goals and you don’t evaluate through analytics whether you’re achieving those goals.
Get started on your Goals (and Mission):
– Define your business’ overall mission/objective first – your digital marketing strategy must fit into your grand plan, what is the overriding objective you want your digital marketing efforts to achieve (for example do you want to position your company as the go-to online provider for computer parts in Asia)? This is your mission.
Set & Measure Your KPIs:
– Get specific with your KPIs by identifying the figures you will be held accountable for achieving.
– Get realistic with your KPIs by analysing your previous digital marketing strategy first – this will ensure you aim for a positive increase on your current results, while helping you to avoid setting your expectations too high.
– Identify a method to help you measure each of your KPIs – for example, will you use Google Analytics to measure your conversions, your individual social media analytics to track engagement or a tool like BuzzSumo to assess the success of your content marketing?
2. You won’t know your online market share
Customer demand for online services may be underestimated if you haven”t researched this. Perhaps, more importantly, you won’t understand your online marketplace – the dynamics will be different to traditional channels with different types of customer profile and behaviour, competitors, propositions and options for marketing communications.
3. Existing and start-up competitors will gain market share
If you’re not devoting enough resources to digital marketing strategy or you are using an ad-hoc approach with no clearly defined strategies, then your competitors will eat your digital lunch!
4. You don’t have a powerful online value proposition
A clearly defined online customer value proposition will help you differentiate your online service encouraging existing and new customers to engage initially and stay loyal.
5. You don’t know your online customers well enough
It’s often said that digital is the “most measurable medium ever”. But Google Analytics and similar will only tell you volumes of visits, not the sentiment of visitors, what they think. You need to use other forms of website user feedback tools to identify your weak points and then address them.
6. You are not integrated (“disintegrated”)
It’s all too common for digital marketing activities to be completed in silos whether that’s a specialist digital marketer, sitting in IT or a separate digital agency. It’s easier that way to package digital marketing strategy into a convenient chunk. But of course it’s less effective. Everyone agrees that digital media work best when integrated with traditional media and response channels.
7. Digital doesn’t have enough people/budget given its importance
Insufficient resources will be devoted to both planning and executing e-marketing and there is likely to be a lack of specific specialist e-marketing skills which will make it difficult to respond to competitive threats effectively.
8. You’re wasting money and time through duplication
This is particularly the case in larger companies where you see different parts of the marketing organization purchasing different tools or using different agencies for performing similar online marketing tasks.
9. You’re not agile enough to catch up or stay ahead
If you look at the top online brands like Amazon, Dell, Google, Tesco, Zappos, they’re all dynamic – trialling new approaches to gain or keep their online audiences.
10. You’re not optimizing
Every company with a website will have analytics, but many senior managers don’t ensure that their teams make or have the time to review and act on them. Digital marketing strategy enables you to get the basics right, then you can progress to continuous improvement of the key aspects like search marketing, site user experience, email and social media marketing.
Create a Digital Marketing Strategy and don’t stick to it? But, but, what do you mean?
Before the panic sets in, let me explain – your plan is never going to be perfect from the outset. Not every assumption you make is going to be correct. And although you have taken every care to craft a carefully constructed plan based on a set of insightful assumptions and analysis you still can’t predict exactly how your customers will behave.
It is, therefore, essential to continuously measure and monitor your digital marketing strategy’s performance and to change elements where needed.
Ready to Get Started?
Whether you need an extensive digital marketing strategy or want your business to grow exponentially, we are here to help you achieve a stronger and more permanent connection with your target audience online.
Contact Us TODAY for your free no-obligation consultation!