Developing a digital marketing strategy is one of the most bankable skills a marketer can have nowadays. After all, a digital marketing strategy is a way for you to realize your business’ marketing goals. All your online marketing efforts— from posting a simple Tweet to interpreting a complex web analytics report— are under the shade of the Digital Marketing Strategy umbrella. While digital marketers try to cover all the bases such as goals, messaging, customer profile, channels, tools, and location, many are still left dumbstruck with the lackluster results coming out of their campaigns.
We have rounded up the top 7 mistakes people make with their digital marketing strategies. By deconstructing these, we hope digital marketing professionals can pick up the lessons couched within each failure and avoid making the same mistakes when crafting their own digital marketing strategy:
- Unclear Goals
- Not Mapping the Territory
- Wrong Targeting
- No Accurate Measurement of Campaigns
- Inadequate Team Skill Set
- Rushing Results within a Rigid Timeline
- Misaligned Sales and Marketing Teams
Unclear or conflicting goals
The lack of clear goals is a key factor that can send your digital marketing strategy hurtling towards an inevitable failure. In developing a strategy, multiple goals are okay and sometimes desirable— the crucial point is that your goals are clear, achievable, and do not conflict with each other. Is your goal to raise awareness of your brand through increased reach, traffic, and conversion? Or is it to generate more qualified leads?
Remember, clear goals not only set and push your team forward together, they also provide clarity on which metrics should be used to track your progress and calibrate your initiatives mid-execution.
Even if you pin down a goal or two, it doesn’t end there. Clear articulation of goals is needed so that everyone has a consensus of what the goals are and what is required for the team to achieve them. Many businesses use the “SMART goal” framework in writing clear and effective goals:
Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Relevant
Time-bound
Example: By Q3 of 2019, the XXX website must reach at least 10,000 new visits daily.
Conversely, having too many or conflicting goals can be a logistical nightmare—almost always causing a diminished focus and conflicting priorities. In the planning stage, it’s easy to be excited about the campaign and set several goals you thought would be a breeze to achieve. But when the difficulty of managing time, resources, and cost kicks during execution, you may end up sacrificing one goal over another.
Inadequate marketplace research
Another pitfall to avoid is implementing your strategy when you have not conducted a thorough research about the industry and your competitors. In Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, mastering the war terrain and its characteristics can offer you an advantage over your enemies, who—in this case— are your business competitors.
Positioning oneself in the market is no Sunday picnic, especially for emerging brands. Lack of industry research impairs your digital marketing strategy and ignoring your competitors— what they’re offering, what message they’re communicating, as well as what they’re doing wrong— is a mortal sin. This is true even for established brands. Competitor analysis can provide you insights on how to develop your core values, brand attributes, unique selling proposition, etc. You can also take cues from your competition for trends, new technologies, and tactics that you can re-engineer for your own digital marketing strategy.
Poor (usually lazy) targeting
Many digital marketers, held hostage by the trap of overspecialization, sometimes put tools first before customers. They are proficient in diagnostic tools, reporting software, and CMS, but they lack the vital context about who they’re doing the strategy for. With the slew of marketing automation tools available today, digital marketers are prone to thinking that their strategy is merely defined by the tools and platforms used to push ads, publish content, and generate reports.
Every business should know who their primary customer is. Sadly, many skip this part because they think they know their target market so well that there’s no need for market research, which can be costly and time-consuming. Not knowing your target market is one way to tighten the noose around the business’ neck.
Half the time, the problem isn’t about NOT knowing who the target market is. It’s about having an incomplete profile of the buyer persona as most marketers neglect to spend time and effort unweaving the persona’s psychographics, or the person’s way of thinking, values, attitudes, and spending habits. It’s important that when developing a strategy, we don’t lose sight of the needs of the customers. The right one, at that!
Poorly defined campaign metrics
Reporting of results is an essential step in knowing whether your strategy was successful or not. Numbers don’t lie and reports help you demonstrate the value of your digital marketing efforts and their benefits to the business.
However, digital marketers often find it hard to measure the progress and effectivity of their campaigns because there are no metrics in place or they’re incapable of looking into and tracking the right data. Should you report about impressions or conversions? New visitors or return visitors? Should you track traffic by channels or sources?
Classified in 3 broad categories, below are some metrics you can use to measure and evaluate your digital marketing strategy and campaigns:
TRAFFIC METRICS
- Total Site Visits
- Interactions per Visit
- Bounce Rate
- Mobile Traffic
- Traffic by Channels or Sources
CONVERSION METRICS
- Total Conversions
- Conversion Funnel Rate
- Click-through Rate
- Cost per Conversion
- Lead to Close Ratio
REVENUE METRICS
- Value per Visit
- ROI (Projected & Actual)
- Cost per Acquisition
- Net Customer Worth
- Customer Lifetime Value
Additionally, this goes back to the issue of having non-SMART goals (See 1. Unclear or conflicting goals). Poorly articulated goals don’t provide the stakeholders information on how the campaigns will be measured and the overall strategy evaluated. As soon as clear goals are in place, it should be equally clear what needs to be measured and the measurement process should be documented well before it is needed.
Insufficient Skillset Inhouse
As the digital landscape continues to evolve and take shape, more businesses across industries are realizing the need to fill digital marketing roles in their organizations.
Since a job in the digital field offers lucrative opportunities, marketers bring their A-game by training to become multi-skilled yet specialized in a few areas. They are called “T-shaped” employees. For example, you may have advanced skills in web development but basic skills in design or SEO.
We’ve seen scores of good strategies fail in the hands of the unskilled. Understanding the skill set of your current digital marketing team enables you to make informed decisions on how best to prioritize, delegate, and eventually hire other talents to bridge the skills gap, if one exists. Failure to do so not only leads to unsuccessful campaigns, but also job dissatisfaction.
Allowing panic to drive decision-making
A digital marketing strategy can leverage either organic or paid mediums. If you want immediate results, you can use paid platforms to publish your content. However, paid ads are expensive and unsustainable. If you stop spending money, the platform will stop sending you traffic or impressions. Organic efforts are free and more sustainable, but take time. For example, ranking a website for a certain keyword takes 3-6 months or more, depending on the popularity of the keyword (the more common the keyword, the longer time required for ranking).
Succumbing to pressure to show quick results, digital marketers abandon or routinely change their game plan at the first sign of an ‘underperforming’ campaign. Digital marketers must be adept at looking into the campaign’s analytics and correctly interpreting the data to know how to proceed. In some cases, testing and optimization are needed to transform an underperforming campaign to a winning one!
Misalignment of Sales and Marketing functions
If the sales team is neither involved nor engaged in the marketing planning process, and handoff points are unclear between them, the customer and the business suffer. Such misalignment leads to lower quality leads, reduced lead conversion rates, and lower sales closing rates.
According to HubSpot, 50% of sales growth success starts and ends with Marketing. If both sales and marketing teams are aligned, and they understand each other’s responsibilities and goals, the business will grow, and more delighted customers will come out of the buyer’s journey.
TIPS TO AVOID THE FAILURES
So with all the caveats, how does one pave the Yellow Brick Road to digital marketing success? Developing and implementing a digital marketing strategy can be daunting. Lucky for you, we’ve outlined some basic rules that will help you start on the right foot.
- Write SMART goals
- Conduct research about the industry and your competitors
- Determine your buyer personas (primary, secondary, and even tertiary)
- Define core messaging
- Document the plan so that all involved teams are in sync and can work together toward the goal
- Familiarize yourself and use modern software to automate some elements in your implementation
- Choose the right channels to run your campaign on (organic search, social media, PPC, OOH, television, email, etc.).
- Run your campaign
- Define your campaign’s conversion path or sales funnel
- Track all aspects of your campaign
- Set clear accurate metrics to track progress and determine success of the campaign
By following these steps and avoiding the common strategic failures, you now have solid white lines to test your strategy within and run your campaigns with fewer hurdles and setbacks. By learning from the mistakes of others, we can save time, effort, and money— extremely valuable resources that could be spent on improving other aspects of the business.