Signs Your Digital Marketing Strategy Is Missing The Mark

As you work on promoting your brand in the digital space, your efforts may not always bring the results you’re looking for. In order to adjust your strategy, you have to identify where you’re missing the mark, which is often easier said than done.

Analyzing your own digital marketing strategy can prove challenging, but it’s well worth the time and effort. With the information you gather, you can make key improvements needed to accelerate the success of all your marketing campaigns. For help taking an honest look at your approach, explore these five signs your digital marketing strategy is missing the mark.

Target Audience Uncertainties

Before you can build a strong marketing program, you need to know exactly who your target audience is. You have to go beyond simply understanding why your customers come to your brand, to knowing all their motivations and preferences. If you don’t, your content, ads, and other marketing materials could fail to resonate and promote engagement.

To make sure you understand your audience, take the time to build buyer personas. Dig deep in your sales and marketing data to discover as much as you can about your target audience, such as:

• Age
• Income
• Career path
• Hobbies
• Shopping preferences
• Challenges or pain points
• Education level
• Location

Then, use that information to create buyer personas, or a big picture overview of your target customer. With these overviews in hand, you’ll find it much easier to reach your target audience with relevant ads in all the right places.

Strategy Lacks Structure

Effective digital marketing strategies start with a solid plan and continually evolve using performance data from each past campaign. Engaging in every channel and tactic is not enough to ensure the success of your digital marketing program. You need to have an actionable plan in place from the start.

• Build buyer personas for your brand and use them to guide all content creation
• Take the time to understand how your customers navigate the buyer’s journey
• Integrate a smart media mix full of all the channels your target audience frequents
• Work performance tracking into all you do and make key adjustments as you go

If your strategy does not have a clearly-defined structure, building upon your past failures and successes is just not possible. So start with a plan, then move onto optimizing it and you will better position your brand to achieve great results.

Absence Of Set Goals

In order to track the performance of your marketing campaigns effectively, you need to establish well-defined objectives for each one. The goals should revolve around your preferred key performance indicators, or KPIs.

Primary KPIs depend on your selected digital marketing channels. Social media campaigns might center around boosting followers, engagement, and site traffic, while search engine marketing efforts may revolve around improving conversions and revenue.

With a close eye on key metrics, you can objectively measure and improve upon the success of your campaigns. You can also tell where your efforts are paying off the most by looking at your ROI, guiding you to the most successful path for your brand.

Website Traffic Stays Low

Your website is at the heart of your digital brand presence — and almost every campaign drives at least some traffic to the site. If you are running paid ads, social media content, and other efforts, but not seeing any traffic improvements, your digital marketing strategy is more than likely missing the mark. You should always see a continual improvement in your website performance metrics or it is time to make some adjustments.

You may need to alter how you distribute content — or adjust the focus of your content altogether —  to better speak to the needs of your target audience. Or you may need to turn your attention to building a strong backlinking strategy to improve the authority of your website and boost search engine rankings (and traffic) along the way.

Unfortunately, it can be difficult to know just what to change to dial in your digital marketing performance. Low website traffic can result from a number of issues ranging from slow site load speeds to simply producing the wrong content. Luckily, you can have a digital marketing specialist look at your strategy and see where it falls short if you cannot make heads or tails of the situation.

Poor Conversion Rates

To build the success of your brand, your website and ad content need to drive conversions. If your digital marketing efforts do not measurably improve your conversion rates, big changes are in order. Otherwise, your marketing ROI could continue to decrease, leaving your brand without the marketing funds it needs to thrive and grow.

Before you can even think about improving your conversion rates, however, you must be measuring them separately across every channel. That way, you can attribute conversions to the right source and know just where to focus your efforts. As you determine which channels drive the most conversions, you can work on improving your success there, boosting your marketing ROI.

As it all comes back to your website, you also need to set it up to drive conversions as people visit each page. Test calls to action and forms on your website. Try different layouts and engagement points throughout your content. As people respond to these elements, you can drive conversions with retargeting and other smart digital marketing tactics.

Using The Signs to Improve Your Digital Marketing Success

With an honest look at your digital marketing strategy, you can find where you’re missing the mark and optimize your channels. Using data gives you the ability to dial in your marketing efforts and improve where you fall short. Otherwise, you’ll continue to make changes in the dark without knowing if it will pay off.

If you are unsure where to start, there are many templates online you can use to setup a basic digital marketing strategy. Start with your business goals, translate those goals to KPIs, ensure your website is conversion-focused, and choose the appropriate channels and tactics that resonate most with your identified audience.

Need Some Strategy Help?

If you are unsure where to start, partner with a digital marketing specialist to build a comprehensive digital marketing strategy. A specialist will be able to help you make sense of all the channels and tactics at your disposal and build a larger strategy that drives towards your business goals. If you're looking for a solution tailored to your exact business needs, give us a shout - we're always happy to help!