3 Reasons Your Digital Strategy Will #Fail

Ampla’s Digital Marketing Strategy Blueprint series is perfect for small and medium sized businesses, nonprofits, and digital marketers seeking a fresh perspective on digital strategy. This is part 7 of 7.

Over the last six blog posts, we’ve covered the complete loop of digital strategy development, implementation, and reporting. It is a cycle that repeats over and over, with modifications each time based on newly acquired knowledge and technology. Even though the best plans can be laid out, there are many reasons your marketing efforts could fail before they even begin. Many of your companies won’t have these problems, yet many will. This final installment covers three traps that will hold you back from reaching success in digital marketing.

1. Lack of Time

Have you ever heard or been part of a conversation that went like this:

·      Person 1: “How’s work?”

·      Person 2: “Work is good, we’re really busy right now. Totally slammed.”

·      Person 1: “Well, that’s good. I know it’s a bummer to be slammed, but at least it’s job security. Rather be slammed than twiddling your thumbs, right?”

·      Person 2: “Yeah, I guess so.”

While being busy at work oftentimes implies job security, it can also be a detriment to job security. Busy does not always equate to working smart or productive. If other responsibilities or ad hoc “fires” take priority over executing your marketing masterplans, then performance will suffer. Time that was dedicated to implementing and overseeing a campaign’s success can evaporate without you realizing it.

The best way to negate risk of time thieves is to handle the “time issue” from the onset. If you’re in a marketing planning meeting and your ideas exceed the headcount that exists, then some of those ideas may need to be scaled back. You may also plan on obtaining temporary help from a consultant or contracted worker to open up a new pool of available time. If a project is properly scoped from the beginning, then time will be less of an issue because that will be estimated as part of the project scope.

2. Lack of Resources

Another way that I’ve seen companies fail in their marketing efforts is by not having the resources available to pull off a project. Contextually, I’m referring to resources as human capital and technology.

An example of this would be that your marketing plans include an A/B testing schedule that you’d like to be automated, yet you’re not working with a platform that will perform these functions. It’s time to modify your plans based on the technology you have at your grasps, or plan on having the right technology in enough time to test before launching your marketing.

Another resource example examines the human capital aspect. Perhaps your marketing plans have an increased budget and an additional headcount will be required to achieve your revenue goals. If you don’t add headcount, then you risk burning your current employees out, possibly losing members of your team. As simple as it may sound, your chances of marketing success are much better when human capital is lined up appropriately with the marketing goals. 

3. Lack of Knowledge

Let’s assume you have all the time in the world and a bounty of headcount at your fingertips. However, nobody knows their way around a CRM platform, how to set up Google Tag Manager, or do other digital-specific tasks that may be required to execute and measure your marketing plan. Again, I say your marketing plan with #fail.

I completely believe that people can be trained and develop skills for the in-the-trenches work when it comes to digital marketing. Digital marketing changes all the time and many in the digital world are self-taught. However, some things are trickier to learn, and a knowledge set should be available to set a marketing plan up for success.

One remedy for this is to hire specialists, contractors, or consultants that can lend a hand to execute a function and train others. Further, an internal training schedule can be developed to share digital marketing skills. As knowledge increases, your likelihood of success will join in formation.

The 3-Link Chain

Think of time, resources, and knowledge as a 3-link chain bracelet. They all connect with each other to complete a circle. If even one link breaks, failure will occur. For example, if you have time and resources, but no knowledge, then your plans will fail because nobody knows what they’re doing. If you have knowledge and resources, but no time, then everyone is too busy to make it a priority. You get the picture.

Digital Marketing Strategy Blueprint Series Summary

Thank you all for taking the time to read our seven part series. Our hope is that you can take some of the things you learned and immediately put them into play with your digital marketing. We’ve uncovered why you need a digital strategy and how to put it into action. If there are any questions about the content that was covered in this series, please reach out to us. We’d love to hear from you!

What are other roadblocks that you’ve run into that impeded the success of your marketing planning?

In case you missed the other blogs in this series, here’s a link to each of them:

Part 1: Framework: Digital Strategy vs. Digital Tactics      

Part 2: A 30-Point Digital Audit Checklist

Part 3: In a Perfect Digital Marketing World

Part 4: The Unfair Reality of Digital Marketing

Part 5: Digital Marketing: How to Plan Your Next Campaign

Part 6: Marketing is Like Sports Because…

The Unfair Reality of Digital Marketing

Ampla’s Digital Marketing Strategy Blueprint series is perfect for small and medium sized businesses, nonprofits, and digital marketers seeking a fresh perspective on digital strategy. This is part 4 of 7.

Up to this point, we’ve provided an overview of digital strategy, shared a checklist for conducting a digital audit, and introduced some great digital marketing brainstormingquestions. This installment of the Digital Marketing Strategy Blueprint series will take us further into the overall strategic process and discuss the unfair realities of a creating a perfect digital marketing plan versus what really gets implemented from that plan.

The Marketing Montage vs. Reality

If only a marketer’s life was like a 90 minute motion picture. A bunch of people would be sitting around a well-lit conference room table brainstorming, then someone would say, “I’ve go it!” Next, a montage would take place with some catchy music to get your heart rate pumping. It would show different frames of people working, smiling, struggling, smiling, late nights at the office, sighs, people drinking coffee, smiling, sleeves rolled up, things getting done, and people smiling again. At the end of the montage, the new marketing campaign launches late at night, and everyone toasts some bubbly in the office to this success.

This is not reality though. In the real world of unfairness, it’s most likely that your team comes up with a completely innovative idea, solution, or concept, only to find roadblocks every which way you turn. Not enough budget. Limited technology. Lack of time. Lack of support from leadership. Office politics. Lack of talent to implement successfully. Projects improperly scoped. Expect the trials my friends, for they will come.

Digital Roadblock Considerations

Whether you’re working to implement new or proven ideas with your marketing, there are certain items that will govern what gets done. Some of the considerations are:

Business Goals: Do these new or current ideas/tactics support business goals? If not, then remove them from consideration.

Cost: Do you have or will you be able to obtain the budget you need to implement your strategy? Costs may consist of investing in people, technology, vendors, training, or advertising/media.

Talent: Do you have the talent internally to pull off your strategic ideas? If not, can you acquire it through hiring or contracting the talent?

Prioritizing: Since limitations exist on money and resources, how will you prioritize marketing channels and how much money you put into each? For example, do you put money into Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, Display Ads, all three, or something else? Also, how much ad spend will you budget for each of these channels? How will you prioritize AdWords versus Facebook Ads? Will you do A/B testing by channel to determine budget fluctuation between channels?

Audience:Taking new ideas into account, are the marketing channels and messaging appropriate for your audience? By understanding your audience’s behaviors and interests, your messaging can begin to appear at the right places and times with messaging that resonates. For example, an SMS campaign may be great for some companies, yet be a complete waste of money for others. Consider your audience.

So What Do You Do?

As with many things in life, you must be prepared for the worst, but expect the best with your digital marketing. This means you seek to be smarter, more creative, more innovative, and more effective with your marketing efforts. Continue to brainstorm and develop innovative concepts and solutions. Also, understand the realities and cumbersome work it may take for your idea to see the light of day.

If you approach your strategy with the understanding that ideas may be met with adversity, you’ll be better able to plan for contingencies. This means having many of the questions answered up front that may come from internal and external stakeholders. Arm yourself with data, rationale, case studies, passion, and any other tools to support your recommendations.

Some of the best ideas will never be revealed to the public. That’s the unfair reality of digital marketing. Yet, success is a rented position without innovation. Continue to create ideas and implement what makes sense.

At this point, you’ve decided what you want to do. The next step is determining how to do it. Our next blog, “Digital Marketing: How to Plan Your Next Campaign,” will outline ways to organize and structure functions that comprise the planning process of a digital marketing campaign.

What are some of the stumbling blocks you’ve ran into and how did you overcome them? Comment below!

In case you missed the other blogs in this series, here’s a link to each of them:

Part 1: Framework: Digital Strategy vs. Digital Tactics      

Part 2: A 30-Point Digital Audit Checklist

Part 3: In a Perfect Digital Marketing World

A 30-Point Digital Audit Checklist

Ampla’s Digital Marketing Strategy Blueprint series is perfect for small and medium sized businesses, nonprofits, and digital marketers seeking a fresh perspective on digital strategy. This is part 2 of 7.

The first installment of our Digital Marketing Strategy Blueprint series provided an overview on digital strategy versus tactics. This blog will review how to calibrate your strategy from the onset.

Why A Digital Audit is Important

Performing a digital audit can be a tedious time and resource drain. So why do it? A digital audit is important because it provides a ground-level understanding of the your company’s digital efforts. The audit helps to tell the story of where you’ve been and where you are now. It’s difficult to provide a benchmark of success for your organization’s digital marketing efforts if you don’t have performance baselines established. For example, how can you determine how much your email list size has grown if you don’t have a historic record of it’s growth? How can you tell if your SEM conversion rates are meeting your company objectives?

If never completed before, a digital audit allows you to document the digital marketing ecosystem that your company has created. It provides a snapshot of a window in time that can be expanded and updated. The audit also helps to tell the long-term story of “here was the baseline that we established in the audit, here’s what we did to improve, and here’s how we performed compared to the baseline.”

I’ve often seen businesses and nonprofits measure marketing success based on “industry-related” benchmarks. I would caution your organization to not measure itself against industry benchmarks as the main driver of success or failure of its efforts. It’s good to know industry benchmarks as a data point; however, it’s more important to set benchmarks against your own unique company’s performance. Better or worse, your company may not have industry average budgets, audience size, mix of customers/clients/donors, etc. Measure against yourself and strive to get better.

30 Point Digital Audit Checklist

At a minimum, I’d recommend creating a spreadsheet to track metrics over time. A thorough audit may look at hundreds of different data points to provide a super comprehensive picture, including competition comparisons. Some audit items might be very basic, while some more complex. Depending on the maturity of your organization, you might look at the previous 12 months worth of data, or previous 30 days for new companies.

For the sake of getting started, here’s a checklist of items that you might consider when putting your audit together:

1.   Current cost to acquire a new customer/client/donor online:

2.   Average revenue per transaction:

3.   Lifetime value of a customer/client/donor:

4.   Facebook audience size:

5.   Peak time of day your Facebook audience is online:

6.   Twitter audience size:

7.   Peak time of day your Twitter audience is online:

8.   Pinterest audience size:

9.   What email platform are you currently using?

10.  What are the limitations of this platform?

11.  Email list size:

12. Email conversion rate:

13.  Email open rate:

14.  Email click through rate:

15.   Revenue per thousand emails:

16.  Adwords click through rate:

17.   Adwords conversion rate:

18.   Bing Ads click through rate:

19.   Bing Ads conversion rate:

20.  Website sessions per month:

21.   Average time on website:

22.   Percentage of mobile vs. desktop visitors:

23.   Return on ad spend:

24.   Donation page abandonment rate (nonprofits):

25.    Shopping cart abandonment rate:

26.       Have you established consistent user names across social media sites?

27.        Have you set up accounts on social media sites that you aren’t using yet?

28.        Click through rates on display ads:

29.        Current net promoter score:

30.        Is website mobile optimized?

This list is not even the tip of the iceberg for a complete digital audit; however, it’s enough to get you started and expand for your own company. If you’d like a thorough audit performed, Ampla can assist with providing this valuable cornerstone for your digital marketing strategy. Just reach out to us!

The next blog in our Digital Marketing Strategy Blueprint series will reveal what happens once your digital audit is complete. Entitled, “In a Perfect Digital Marketing World,” the blog will reveal tips, tricks, and ideas on how to put a framework around creating and accomplishing big goals for your digital marketing.

Add any additional items to the digital audit checklist in the comments section!

In case you missed the first blog in this series, here’s a link to it: Part 1: Framework: Digital Strategy vs. Digital Tactics