One of the most frustrating experiences for a marketing professional, or a business owner, is to invest time and energy into your marketing and receive less than desirable results. As much as you’d like to deny it, without effective marketing, you will struggle to accomplish your sales goals.

The following are seven reasons your digital strategy may not be working.  I’d encourage you to evaluate your digital strategy based on these reasons and identify areas you can improve to help you achieve your revenue and growth goals.

1 | You Haven’t Established Clear Objectives

What is your objective for the coming year?  Are you trying to increase the traffic to your website? Grow the number of “likes” or “followers” on your social channels? Or have you been stuck trying to figure out what your digital objective should be?

It’s important to have clear objectives which, if accomplished, will positively impact your bottom line. For example: Increasing your traffic won’t necessarily add to your bottom line, but increasing the number and quality of leads has the ability to drive revenue.

The following are four objectives to consider if you’ve struggled to identify objectives that will drive the business results to make you the hero instead of the goat within your organization.

  1. Improve your visitor to lead conversion ratio
  2. Improve your lead to customer conversion ratio
  3. Lower the amount it costs you to acquire a customer
  4. Improve your customer churn rate and level of customer advocacy

2 | You’re Too Focused Internally

Frequently we find there is too much energy and focus placed on the aesthetics of a website and personal opinions on how things should function on the site. The difficulty with this approach is that you’re leaving out the only stakeholder’s opinion that matters … the BUYER PERSONA you’re marketing to!

The most effective digital strategies are created from the perspective of the specific Buyer Personas you are trying to reach. It’s important to have an intimate understanding of the buyer journey, and the buyer’s intent at each stage. If you utilize this information to deliver value throughout the entire buyer journey, you will create an excellent user experience that creates “raving fans” of your Brand. Additionally, you’ll be able to build a highly-effective website using real data instead of opinions.

3 | You’re Not Creating Enough Value

Simply having a website with a bunch of information about your products, services and team members with no call to action, or a call to action that allows your visitor to “request a quote” isn’t creating value for your visitors. If you aren’t consistently creating compelling content for your personas, you’ll soon be losing visitors and ultimately customers to your competitors who are.

As you think through your personas and their buyer journey, come up with ideas for eBooks, videos, checklists, and any other type of downloadable content you can give away to your visitors. This type of free valuable content helps build credibility with your visitors as well as helps to put you in the position of trusted advisor.

4 | You’re Too Focused on Tactics

There will never be a lack of the “latest and greatest” digital platform or “SEO tip” for you to implement to (purportedly) land you in the number one position on Google. There’s an abundance of SEO blogs, Internet Marketing advice sites, forums and enough links to marketing articles floating around social media to keep your eyes occupied all day, every day. If you get trapped into chasing the latest tactic, your strategy will suffer!

Don’t focus on the tactics. Focus on exactly what you’re going to be judged on. Generating more leads which will result in more sales.

5 | You’re Not Measuring Everything

The beauty of your digital strategy is your ability to optimize your approach which can result in lower costs and less waste. You have the ability to measure everything and can cut out the items which aren’t providing an ROI. Unless you have an unlimited amount of cash to burn and have zero concern with profitability … you should measure EVERYTHING!

6 | Your Sales and Marketing Depts Aren’t Aligned

For some strange reason there seems to be a longstanding conflict between sales and marketing departments everywhere!  The sales department frequently complains that marketing doesn’t get them enough leads and, the leads marketing does generate are bad. On the other hand the marketing department complains that if the sales department handled the leads appropriately, and in many cases, even called the leads, they’d have plenty of new customers!

There is no reason for this conflict. Sales and marketing should be like the yin and yang and work together harmoniously since they are in it for the same thing. New customer acquisition. When sales and marketing actively collaborate and share feedback, the customer experience will improve and revenue will grow!

7 | You’re Not Holding Anyone Accountable to Results

If you don’t have a target to aim for, or someone directly responsible for hitting that target, your chances for success are drastically reduced!  It may seem as if being held accountable to a specific target would be stressful for a marketing professional, and that may be why so few organizations have specific and measurable digital goals.

I believe that working actively with the leadership of an organization to set very specific goals, and being accountable to achieve those goals, ultimately relieves stress. It reduces the unknown, creates urgency, spurs activity and releases creativity to figure out what is required to get from point “A” to point “B.”

How is your digital strategy?

Did some of these challenges resonate with you along the way? We’d love to hear your thoughts below!  If you’d like to have a conversation about any challenges you’re experiencing with your digital strategy, click here to contact us.

Click below to download this free eBook