10 Reasons Why You Need A Digital Marketing Strategy In 2021 (#3 Will Blow Your Mind)

In the modern world, digital marketing is now more important than ever, but where do you start if you want to develop an effective digital marketing strategy in your business?

It’s a question on the tip of a lot of business leaders’ tongue, as they know just how vital digital and mobile channels are now for acquiring and maintaining a customer base. Yet, they don’t have a plan integrated into their business plan to support digital transformation, company growth and to engage with their audiences effectively online.

If your business doesn’t have a robust marketing strategy you will suffer from at least one of the 10 problems that I am going to be highlighting in this article and you will lose out to your competitors who are more digitally savvy!

So, if you don’t yet have a digital marketing strategy, or maybe you just simply don’t know where to start we’ve highlighted the top 10 most common issues (in our opinion), that come up time and time again if you don’t have a clear digital marketing strategy!

1. You Don’t Know Who Your Online Audience Is Or Your Market Share:

Customer demand for online services is critical, and you may have underestimated this if you’ve not looked into it. Perhaps, and more importantly, you don’t actually know or understand your online marketplace. They dynamics are very different from traditional pre-pandemic channels with different types of customer profiles and behaviours. You have to think about where your target market hangs out and where your content will be most of value!

2. You Are Directionless:

Companies without a digital strategy (and some that do) do not have a clear strategic objective for what they want to achieve online in terms of obtaining new customers or building on existing relationships. If you don’t have SMART goals set out, you probably don’t put enough resources to attract the intended target market, nor evaluate through analytics whether you’re achieving those objectives.

3. You Don’t Have A Powerful Online Value Proposition:

A clearly defined digital value proposition personalised to your different target customers will help you to differential your online services from your competitors. Encouraging existing and new prospects to engage initially and stay loyal to you.

Developing an omnichannel marketing strategy is vital for this for the majority of organisations, since the content is what engages your audiences through multiple channels e.g., search, social, blogs/articles, email marketing etc.

4. You Don’t Know Your Online Customers Well Enough:

It’s no secret that and often said that digital is the “most measurable medium ever”. However, Google Analytics and other tools will only tell you the volume of visitors, not the reason why they have visited or what they are thinking. You need to use other forms of website feedback tools such as, Survey Monkey then conduct a SWOT analysis, and implement a robust action plan of how you are going to tackle them.

5. Existing & Start-up Competitors Will Gain Market Share:

If you’re not dedicating sufficient reserves to your digital marketing, or you’re using an ad-hoc approach with no defined strategy, then your competitors will eat you for digital lunch!

6. You’re Not Integrated:

It’s all too common for digital marketing activities to be carried out in silos, whether that’s a specialist digital marketer sitting in IT or outsourcing to a separate digital agency. It feels easier that way to package digital into a convenient chunk. But of course, this is less effective. The majority of people agree that digital media works best when it is integrated with traditional channels.

That’s why I would highly recommend that you implement into your business an integrated digital marketing strategy. This means that your digital marketing works hard for you, not you hard for it! With your integrated plan in place, digital will become part of your marketing activity and an essential part of your business as usual (BAU) activities.

7. You’re Wasting Money AND Time Through Duplication:

Even if your business does have sufficient resources, they may be wasted. This is particularly the case in the larger companies where you often see different parts of the marketing department purchasing different tools or using different agencies for performing similar online marketing tasks – duplication of work!

This is one of the key reasons you need to invest in a digital marketing strategy that works for you, your team and your business. It will allow you to manage and optimise your digital channels and platforms. Driving the marketing results you need to achieve your strategic objectives, and in turn boost your digital marketing return on investment (ROI).

8. Digital Doesn’t Have Enough Heads/Budget Given Its Importance:

Unsatisfactory resources will be devoted to both the preparation and execution of your online marketing strategy (e-marketing). This is likely to be caused by a lack of specialist e-marketing skills, which will make it problematic to respond to competitive threats effectively. In order to upskill, I would advise taking a look at running marketing data reports and website analytics to track the performance.

9. You’re Not Optimising:

Every single company operating with a website has analytics. But many key decision makers and business leader don’t give their teams time to review and act on them. Once your digital marketing strategy allows you to get the basics right, then you can advance to the continuous improvement of key aspects like paid and organic search marketing, email, site user experience and social media marketing.

10. You’re Not Agile Enough To Catch Up And / Or Stay Ahead:

If you take a look at the top performing online brands like Amazon, Google, GymShark, ASOS, Dell, they are all dynamic – consistently trialling new approaches, adapting to changes in the market quickly to gain or keep their online audiences engaged.

Thanks for reading and hopefully there was some value in this for you to take away.

Team AJ