The majority of company executives are aware that in today’s environment they need to have an effective digital marketing plan to help them attain their business goals.

However, ever so many digital marketing campaigns do not reach their business targets, leaving managers and executives struggling to understand why their efforts were unsuccessful.

Our years of experience have taught us that digital marketing efforts fail when an organisation is unproductive in the following areas:

  • Online marketing strategy
  • Digital marketing expertise
  • Marketing and sales technology
  • Marketing and sales methodology
  • Content marketing
  • Budget
  • Leadership

To understand what the difficulties are and how to resolve them let’s look more in depth at these areas.

Many organisations, including online marketing agencies, do not establish a comprehensive digital marketing strategy before they go ahead with their marketing efforts.

Alternatively, they swiftly launch digital campaigns to see what works. Whether you know and use best practices is immaterial if you do not have an effective digital marketing strategy, you will just end up wasting money and time.

The only real question is; How Much Will You Waste?

An effective digital marketing strategy should include the following:

  • SMART goals (Specific, Attainable, Timely, Measurable, Relevant)
  • Digital marketing project plan
  • Marketing and sales assessment of process, resources, tools, and performance
  • Customised inbound marketing methodology
  • Content marketing strategy and plan
  • Market demand analysis
  • Competitive analysis
  • Digital channel strategy
  • Website optimisation plan
  • Value proposition development
  • Buyer persona development

If you do not have an effective digital marketing strategy you are setting yourself up for failure.

Budget

Business owners and executives often have ambitious goals but tend to want to spend the least amount of money to reach them.

So, they employ the services of an agency, or force their internal marketing team to meet customer growth goals and revenue. Senior executives usually have insufficient fundamental knowledge of digital marketing and generally push to achieve aggressive market goals on a minimal budget.

A digital marketing strategy will not only outline the estimated resources required to achieve your goals, but also identify the SMART Goals needed to reach your overall target.

It is vitally important to have both realistic targets alongside realistic budgets in order to have a realistic chance of achieving them.