10 Reasons to Improve Your Digital Marketing Strategy

If you’re trying your best to optimize your digital media and online advertisement, but you’re still not seeing results, you might be feeling frustrated and stressed. Everywhere you turn the best companies are using smooth new websites, flawless design, and seemingly state-of-the-art mobile-friendly websites and apps.

You can’t think of anything you need improvement on, and this is what’s taking its toll on you. If you can’t identify the problem, you can’t treat it! Take some time to reflect on the following in regards to your business’ actions and find an area to improve on.

1. You Lack a Clear Direction

Most companies that try and use digital media without a clear strategy haven’t bothered to lay out specific goals. Pretty much every company wants to achieve online success, gain new clients, and improve relationships with previous ones, but not every business has mapped out exactly how to do so or even what areas they can start from.

If you’re missing clear goals, you won’t know where to direct your resources, or you might not be putting in enough resources at all. Unfortunately, this problem builds on itself, because you also aren’t likely evaluating your performance using analytic techniques to extrapolate what next steps to take.

2. You Don’t Know Your Online Market Share

This is another problem that tends to snowball into further issues. If you haven’t researched your own online market share, you probably are underestimating customer demand for online services. If you don’t have a solid understanding of your online market presence, you won’t have any knowledge of your consumer profile, your competitors in the same industry, and, therefore, the best options for communication with your audience. See our previous post on online marketplace methodology for more help!

3. Competitors

This might seem to be the most obvious, but it’s possible that your competition is getting ahead. Even if your own digital strategies are up to par, it’s true that the marketing world is locked in an arms race, and you can’t be too wary of the competition. Well-established competitors and even new, start-up companies are likely to be stealing your traffic with their own SEO and other techniques.

4. Your Online Value Proposition is Weak or Nonexistent

Check out our post on online customer value proposition. This is necessary to help you make your services stand out from the crowd. Your customers most likely want a clear, comprehensive view of what you can offer them and why they should stay with you. So give them what they want!

5. You Don’t Know Your Customers Well Enough

There are a lot of different areas where your relationship with your customers could use improvement, the must fundamental of which is simply what they want. You might have heard that the digital sphere is the “most measurable medium” we’ve seen yet. However, analytic tools and traffic trackers can only tell you numbers. It’s up to you to find out what your audience really thinks. You’ll need to use other types of website user feedback tools to give your consumers a chance to identify your weak points for you to address, and improve upon, later.

6. You aren’t Properly Integrated

Of course, it’s more than necessary to keep on top of all the new digital media trends. However, digital media is believed to work best when integrated as smoothly as possible with traditional media and response channels. It’s a fine line to walk, that between today’s newest digital strategy and yesterday’s well-established favorites, but it’s a crucial one.

7. Insufficient Resources

To be fair, this is not a problem easily remedied. You’ll need to make sure your company is able to funnel resources towards digital marketing in such a scale that won’t jeopardize the production of your content itself. However, considering hiring a specialized e-marketer or taking a training course so you’re able to respond to competitive threats.

8. Insufficiently Spent Resources

To piggyback off the previous point, there is a flip side: it’s deceptively easy to waste your resources. The most common mistake is duplicating your content. Duplication has been shown to neither harm nor help your rankings in search engine results pages. This is an especially popular problem among larger companies, where different areas of the marketing team purchase multiple tools or use different agencies to perform the same tasks.

9. You’re Slipping Behind

Similar to a previous point, there’s always a chance that the biggest online brands, such as Google, Amazon, Dell, Tesco, and Zappos, have tried out a new technique that’s gaining popularity and returning successful traffic to their website without your knowledge.

10. You’re Not Optimizing

Both in the context of search engine optimization (SEO) and just in general, it’s important that you recognize the aspects of your digital media that give you higher ranking in search engine results page and in general attract the highest amount of viewers. Virtually every business that runs their own website uses analytic tools to review their traffic, but many of the higher-ups in the company don’t strictly enforce that they are efficiently reviewed. It’s crucial that you and your team are constantly on top of your game and always searching for areas to be capitalized on. Once you find a strategy that gets you comfortable with the basics of SEO and other digital strategies, you’ll be able to continually prioritize those aspects of your marketing that attract and retain the most views.

Hopefully you feel a bit more confident about your digital marketing skills – or at least, you have a place to start to looking. All it takes is the formation of some good habits, and a dependable strategy to stay on top of the trends, to remain competitive and successful in your field. Please feel free to share, and comment below what techniques you’ve found, from your experience or otherwise, do or don’t work!