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In Smart Insights’ Managing Digital Marketing Report for 2015, it was found that 47% of organisations currently participate in digital marketing, but lack a clearly defined digital strategy.
If your business is facing digital channel issues, then perhaps it is time to consider a strategic review of your digital efforts. Here are 10 popular reasons that you actually require a digital marketing strategy.
1. Your business lacks direction
Often businesses’ that don’t have clear strategic goals lack a clearly defined digital strategy, and find it difficult to define what they want to achieve online.
Without clear strategic goals, you obviously have no idea where to allocate resources and are unable to evaluate and measure your level of success.
2. You don’t know your online market share
Do you know how many of your sales are generated via online digital channels? You should definitely research this as you can easily underestimate customer demand for your online services.
By implementing a digital strategy, you’re able to understand your place in the online marketplace and the dynamics of operating within digital channels. You’ll be privy to your online customers’ profiles, their behaviour, your competitors’ actions and options within the overall market for customers.
3. Your competitors can take your market share
There is a digital marketing arms race happening. If you are not focused on digital marketing with allocated resource or you make use of an ad-hoc approach with no clear goals, then your competitors will be dominating you in the online space.
4. You lack a UVP (Unique Value Proposition) to make you stand out
What’s your UVP online? What makes you stand out and differentiates you from other online services? You need to ascertain what encourages existing and new customers to engage with your brand and stay customers.
5. You don’t know your audience
You must understand who and where your audience is on your digital channels, such as different social media platforms. Digital is often considered one of the most measurable mediums out there. Utilise feedback and native analytics on all your platforms to see who your primary audience is. They are the people you should be targeting with your tailored content.
6. Are you integrated?
Very commonly in businesses, we see that digital marketing activities are commonly actioned in different silos. A team member doing digital marketing activities, an IT guy in another department helping out and even agency involvement as well.
However, your digital media work should all be integrated across all channels and people involved. This is why a digital media strategy is a necessity as it unifies everything.
7. Digital is understaffed and under-budgeted
Insufficient resources including staff and budget can be detrimental to digital marketing initiatives. Staff and budget are necessary for the planning and executing of any type of digital marketing. Specific specialist skills are required especially when dealing with strong competitors in the online space.
8. Duplication is wasting your money
Even with sufficient resources you may be wasteful. Duplication is a common occurrence where different parts within your marketing department can be purchasing different tools, using other agencies all for performing similar tasks to one another.
A digital marketing strategy makes sure everyone has a defined role and is pulling in the same direction.
9. You’re not really that agile
Take a look at the likes of Google and Amazon. What do they all have in common? They are dynamic and agile in their approach to digital by regularly testing new ways to engage and gain the interest of people on their online platforms.
10. Optimise like you mean it
Your company website has analytics, but isn’t reviewing and acting upon the insights and data gained. With a digital strategy in place, regular reviews of insights and data occur regularly to a plan.
You and your team will be able to consistently improve and optimise key elements of your digital media approach. Soon you will be optimising your website for search engines, implementing paid media campaigns, referring your website’s user experience and perfecting your email marketing campaigns.
A strong digital marketing strategy will address the 10 issues outlined above and unify your digital marketing efforts. You and your staff will all be on the same page, pulling in the same direction, and very soon seeing the results that a well structured digital strategy has been proven to deliver for businesses big and small.
