6 Signs That Your Startup May Not Have A Digital Marketing Strategy

July 22, 2013 - Posted by Rilee Chastain at marketingzen.com

Is your company “doing without thinking,” or do you actually have a strategy?

Many different businesses have their own internal strategies and initiatives set in place in order to support their company goals year to year. Some companies like to focus the majority of their efforts on improving their internal team, while others put their main focus on their products and services. These are the building blocks that help your company be successful and thrive as a business, whether you are selling products to consumers or providing helpful services to other thriving businesses.

In addition to internal strategies, many business, both large and small, also have marketing strategies set in place in order to brand their company and connect further with their audience. Unfortunately, often times these strategies are not completely thought out and are set in place without ever thinking of long term goals or results. This kind of “doing without thinking” strategy is actually not much of a strategy at all.

Here are six signs that you may not actually have a successful digital marketing strategy set in place for your business:

 

1. You Don’t Truly Know Your Audience

When most people think of the term “audience” in terms of business, they often think of demographics―age, gender, location, education, etc. However, when it comes to digital marketing, you  should be thinking about your audience in terms of behavior rather than basic identifying factors. For instance, look into where your audience spends the most time online or what their online behavior looks like. How are they consuming your information? How are they sharing information that they enjoy? Knowing the patterns and preferences of your audience is much more beneficial for your digital marketing strategy than knowing their age.

 

2. You Post Any And Every Kind Of Content

If you find something that is entertaining online, whether it is a funny meme or a helpful infographic, you usually share it with your friends on your personal profile no matter what kind of tone or style it represents. However, this is not the same strategy that you should be following when it comes to sharing content on your company social pages. Instead, you should have defined tone and voice guidelines that are followed across all of your online platforms in order to create a well-known “personality” for your brand.

 

3. You Continue To Change Your Overall Goal

When deciding what exactly you want to get out of your digital marketing efforts, you should pick one goal and stick to it. Coming up with a set objective from the get go will not only help you track your performance over time, but will also show you your clear “successes” so you can put more or less effort into certain strategies in the future.

 

4. You’re Posting The Same Content Across All Platforms

While leveraging your content across all of your different social networks can be very beneficial for getting your campaigns and messages out to your audience, you want to make sure that you are making each post different. Content should be specifically tailored to the audience that is on the end of each of your different social channels, that way you are getting quality interactions from each of your posts.

 

5. You’re Collecting Data But Doing Nothing With It

Many companies who do their own marketing will often sign up for services such as Google or YouTube Analytics, but they won’t actually do anything with the data that is collecting on these sites. However, if you aren’t examining your data and looking at the different patterns and trends that appear, how will you ever know what is working and what is not? In fact, by not tracking data, you could be wasting your company’s time and money by pouring effort into a campaign that is yielding no results. Therefore, be sure that you know how to collect and analyze this helpful data so that you know the best way to spend your marketing budget.

 

6. You’re Weighing All Metrics The Same

Even if you are gathering the data collected by your different campaigns, you could still be losing time and money if you are using the wrong metrics to measure your success. For instance, if you are mainly looking to improve awareness of your brand, clicks may not matter as much to your overall strategy as number of impressions or views. Looking at the wrong metrics, or even weighing them all equally, could set your campaign off on the wrong track.

 

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