6 Ways To Tell If Your Digital Marketing Strategy Is Missing The Mark

(Advertising) It can be difficult to recognize when your digital marketing plan no longer serves your business and needs updating or reworking. Analyzing and objectively evaluating a strategy in which you have invested so much time, money and energy is often difficult, but it is worth it. The sooner you correct faults or deficiencies, the better your overall productivity will be.

Even the most comprehensive digital marketing strategy will fail and begin to add less value to your business. There are signs to look for to see if your strategy is missing the mark and some steps to take to fix it.

Overview of digital marketing strategy

Your digital marketing strategy is an overall plan for building an online presence through channels such as social media, paid advertising, organic search, and web environments. This helps to increase your overall brand awareness and attract potential customers.

A solid strategy enables your business to achieve specific goals through your target audience. Here are some examples of digital marketing strategy:

The tactics you use to implement your digital marketing strategy depend on factors such as your target audience, business goals, and budget. However, your tactics are different from your strategy: your strategy is the overall plan, while tactics are the specific means of implementing your strategy.

How to tell if your digital marketing strategy is bad

A good digital marketing plan takes time, patience, money, and purpose. This often involves weeks and months of customer research, data analysis, brainstorming and strategy development, testing and more. are the results. It can be discouraging when things aren't going well or when things are quiet. However, it is essential to recognize the red flags that indicate that your strategy is not working as well as you hoped.

1. ROI hurts

A low value is one of the clearest signs that you need to rethink your marketing strategy. To see the value of your marketing strategy, you need to look at the exact numbers and return on investment (ROI) of your campaign. If your campaign costs, such as organic marketing, advertising, and social media efforts, exceed your revenue and don't even equal it, it's time to rethink your strategy.

2. Your campaign has passed the deadline

Almost all marketing strategies take time to gain momentum and results. It takes time and patience to make progress in a multi-level marketing campaign. It's not uncommon for strategies to start paying off or for it to take a few months to feel like you're achieving your goals. But that doesn't mean you have to wait until the deadline to start getting results. If your plan is taking longer than expected to see positive results, it's time to rethink your strategy.

3. Negative trend

There's nothing unusual about weekend marketing. Performance drops occur, but when the negative results persist, it's time to improve and rethink your strategy. If you're not getting the same results, your plan needs to be updated or changed entirely.

4. Bounce mobile traffic

Mobile traffic is undoubtedly critical to your overall digital strategy, with more than half of all internet traffic coming from mobile devices. If you're having trouble getting mobile traffic to your website, your website probably needs an update. This is usually due to the website being unresponsive on all platforms or slow loading times.

It might be time to sit down and look at the design of the site and figure out how many buttons are needed to access the shopping cart or call to action, as well as the ability to navigate the site.

5. Your Google ranking drops.

Google's algorithms are constantly changing to find the best search engine results. If you don't pay attention to the changes and don't respond to them, you'll likely see a drop in your rankings. SEO is not a one-time experience, it requires regular maintenance. Besides the technical aspects like page speed and algorithm updates, you need to update your website and organic search strategy regularly.

If you're seeing a significant drop in organic traffic, it's time to rethink your digital marketing strategy.

6. Your conversion suffers

If your website is getting a lot of traffic or your social media posts are getting high exposure, but no one is engaging or converting, that's a red flag for your strategy.

It may be time to start gathering information to determine the source of the problem. Take a closer look at how to optimize your conversion rate and drive customers to your website. If you're not seeing results from your social media strategy, you might want to rethink your advertising content, graphics, or target demographics.

Ways to get your digital marketing strategy back on track Perform a SWOT analysis

A SWOT analysis, which spells out strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, is very important for gaining insight into the issues affecting your marketing strategy. The analysis allows you to consider the internal and external components that affect your brand:

Strengths. These internal factors help your business meet and possibly exceed your goals, such as customer retention or increased sales.

Weaknesses. These factors are the issues that prevent your organization from achieving its goals. Some downsides can be high staff turnover, lack of funds, or frequent customer complaints.

We can. These are positive events outside your organization that can help your organization grow. Some examples include new legislation, a change in attitude or new markets.

Threats. These are potential negative situations that could hurt your business in the future. Some examples include new competition, labor market changes, economic changes, or new regulations.

A SWOT analysis will help you better understand the environment and the issues affecting your marketing strategy.

Imagine your buyer persona

A solid marketing strategy relies on a thorough understanding of your target audience. This should go beyond understanding why your customers choose your brand and exploring their motivations, pain points and preferences. Otherwise, your marketing messages are unlikely to resonate with your brand recipients.

If your strategy isn't working the way you thought it would, it's time to revisit your target audience or, if you haven't already, create a buyer persona. If you've been using the same characters for years, your client may have changed.

For example, they may have moved to a new social media platform or have new pain points. Take the time to talk to buyers and double-check your information. Here are some things you should try to understand:

Notice any changes or inconsistencies in your personality and use the big picture to reevaluate your strategy.

Define your brand goals

A single digital marketing strategy won't do much. It should be linked and supported by your overall business goals. Understanding your overall goals is key to managing your overall strategy and budget.

To track the performance of your campaigns, you need to develop key performance indicators, or KPIs, that reflect your brand goals. Make sure they're relevant to the marketing channels you've chosen. For example, you can track email subscriptions for content marketing and engagement stats for a social media campaign.

Linking your marketing strategy with KPIs to specific business objectives is key to analyzing your various marketing initiatives and helping them achieve their goals.

Reassess your existing channels and digital assets

Once you've clarified your buyer personas and goals, review your channels and digital assets in light of these. Google AdWords, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, etc. See what's missing or not needed on each platform.

Let's say you have a channel like Google Ads that isn't as effective as the others. In this case, you may need to refine your approach to communicate better with your target audience or decide to ditch it altogether and focus on other platforms instead.

Your digital assets and native media can take the form of content and include your About Us page, blog posts, e-books, podcasts, and social media posts. Find out which assets work best, resonate with your customers, and help you achieve your current goals.

For example, if you want to increase the generation of likes, see which pieces of content generate the most results, whether it's a blog post, infographic, e-book or a website. Are there gaps or ineffective parts in your content? Your data can reveal the best content strategies that will improve your overall results.

An audit of your website

Your website is your most important marketing tool. If that doesn't work, your whole strategy will likely suffer. Despite the best marketing strategy, slow site speed or poor navigation can turn off potential customers and damage your brand reputation.

If your strategy doesn't match reality, take the time to rank your website to make sure it's not hurting your marketing efforts. Make sure your website is responsive and mobile-friendly. Track customer behavior on a website to see where a customer tends to go and what's turning them off. If you recently updated a part of your website, you can start from there if your customers suddenly disappear.

Digital Marketing Strategies: Key Findings

Your digital marketing strategy is key to establishing your brand online and driving traffic to your business. Even the most comprehensive plan will eventually fail and crumble. Recognizing red flags is critical to the health of your marketing efforts and your business.

If your campaigns are performing poorly, conversions are declining, and ROI is declining, it's time to reevaluate your strategy to make sure it's still aligned with your goals.

Reassessing your business environment, customers, channels, and digital assets can help you identify weaknesses in your strategy and correct them.

How Hearst Bay can help

If you're struggling to implement your marketing strategy, we can help. Our team of experts has the knowledge and experience to effectively assess your marketing strategy and provide you with the information and tools you need to succeed.

Contact us today to find out how we can take your business to the next level!

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