The majority of business managers are aware that, in order to attain their business goals, they need to have an effective digital marketing plan. More so then ever in today’s current digitally focused environment.
Nevertheless, so many digital marketing campaigns fail to meet their business’ objectives, leaving executives and managers struggling to understand why their endeavours did not succeed.
It has become apparent over the years that digital marketing efforts fail due to organisational shortcomings in one (or more) of several areas, these are:
- Leadership
- Budget
- Marketing & sales methodology
- Marketing & sales technology
- Digital marketing expertise
- Online marketing strategy
To comprehend what the obstacles are and how to overcome them, lets look more in depth at these areas.
It is extremely common for companies, including online marketing agencies, to not develop and plot out a comprehensive digital marketing strategy. They simply make some basic assumptions and go full steam ahead with their marketing efforts.
Another tactic seems to be to quickly launch multiple digital campaigns and assess the results to see what seems to work. However, if you do not have an effective marketing strategy in place, its immaterial as to whether you use best practices or not, you will still end up wasting your time and money.
The only real question is; How much will you waste?
Developing a Strategy
The importance of developing a strategy is vital to long-term success. A phase our Chief Strategist Alex was taught during his army training was known as the Seven P’s (Google it) which succinctly explain why preparation is so important.
A productive digital marketing strategy should incorporate the following:
- SMART goals; specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely
- Digital marketing project plan
- Customised inbound marketing methodology
- Market demand analysis
- Digital channel strategy
- Content marketing strategy & plan
- Website optimisation plan
- Value proposition development
- Competitive analysis
- Buy persona development
Subsequently, if you do not have an efficient digital marketing strategy, you are ultimately setting yourself up to fail.
Budget
Company owners and executives are usually determined to reach their goals.
In addition, they also tend not to want to spend a vast amount of money to reach them. This in turn, means they will employ the services of an agency or use their own internal marketing team, in order to meet customer growth goals and revenue.
Leading executives generally have inadequate knowledge of digital marketing and this knowledge gap tends to lead to them pushing to attain aggressive market goals on a basic budget. A digital marketing strategy will not only layout the approximate resources, but it will also analyse the SMART goals essential to reach the overall target and the likely outlays required to make it achievable. Marketing is often the largest single expense of any digitally-focused business.
It is paramount, to have both realistic targets in conjunction with a realistic budget in order to stand any chance of attaining your overall goal.
If you are looking to develop an effective marketing strategy for your business please get in touch today and we will be delighted to help.
Call us on 0203 150 0565 or email info@thealtitudeagency.com
