Why you should forget your digital marketing strategy

March 18, 2016

According to Smart Insights, 46% of brands don't have a planned digital marketing strategy and 16% have considered a strategy, even developed one, but have yet to integrate it into their team's work processes and methods. This poses an issue if you expect success, if you expect to innovate and grow. This article highlights all the reasons you should forget your digital marketing strategy and return to the drawing board before any damage is done.

Read on to find out more.

Because you don't know what you want

Ultimately, a digital marketing strategy can only be a success if you have a deep understanding of your company's goals and mission statement. This mission will become what fuels and drives your strategy, so acts as the core to the initiative. Without it the campaign has no backbone and is destined to fail.

In addition, knowing what you wants goes beyond having a rough draft of a sentence or two for your 'About us' page on your website. You should have identified realistic KPIs to measure the success of your strategy.

Takeaway - if you don't know what you want and why, forget your digital marketing strategy until you do.

You cannot learn from your past

If you are a brand new business, or your business failed to measure decent campaign tracking in the past, then you will struggle to analyse your past success to help you focus on setting the best KPIs for your next campaign. This doesn't mean you will have to abandon a new campaign all together, but it does mean you will need to establish a robust plan to measure comparative metrics across your industry.

Takeaway - Understand how you will compare the success of this campaign against the competition. Maybe you decide to seek out industry benchmarks to help support your projected goals.

You don't know who your audience is?

Your audience should be at the heart of your strategy, so if you do not have a clear understanding of who exactly you are targeting, then you must literally stop in your tracks and reset. How can you cater to the needs of your audience if you don't know who they are? How can you offer a tailored experience for your audience if you don't know what makes them tick. You should have well-devised personas for each of your audience segments with clear demographics and personality traits identified.

Takeaway - Know your audience and develop personas around each character that could interact with your brand. Immerse yourself in these personas and share it with your team so your digital strategy embraces this group of people.

You don't  have the time nor the team

We cannot all be digital media gurus and if you find yourself playing many roles in your company because there is no capacity to hire a new employee then it is a good idea to scale back and pursue other, free initiatives. Conduct an audit of your existing digital and decide what you need to make your digital marketing strategy a success. Decide if you need to outsource some work and if you have the means to do this.

Takeaways: It is better to have no digital marketing strategy at all, than to launch a poorly executed campaign due to lack of input. Scale back and reset.

You don't have a plan

Granted, no plan is perfect and usually marketers deviate away from the plan eventually anyway. Despite this, simply having a plan from the beginning helps to kick the campaign off on the right foot. The plan will develop, change and expand iteratively as the campaign grows, however the initial plan will help to guide the digital success.

Takeaways: Plan, plan and plan some more. Even if you think you can predict trends, create a plan and see if they grow into fruition.

There you have it, 5 reasons why you should forget your digital marketing strategy. Join us on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter to continue the conversation or contact us if you are in need of a digital marketing audit.

Written by
Alexander Rauser
Alexander Rauser

CEO

Alexander Rauser is the author of Boardroom Guide to Digital Accountability and Digital Strategy: A Guide to Digital Business Transformation, and creator of the DSX Program, a digital strategy and transformation program for Enterprises.

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