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A New Digital Marketing Strategy in 2021 to Support Digital Transformation and Company Development.

Where do I start if I want to develop a digital marketing plan?  This question has become common because businesses now know how vital digital and mobile channels are for them to get and keep customers. But they do not have a plan to grow and engage their audiences effectively.

If your business does not have a digital marketing plan, you will suffer from the ten problems highlighted in this article and lose out to competitors who are more digitally savvy.

The 800 Digital recommended approach for developing a digital strategy.

Whether or not you have a digital marketing strategy, the approach you need to use to improve your digital marketing is to compare where you are now and assess the potential against what you need to achieve.

There are two simple alternatives we use for creating a plan to suggest a way forward:

• Start with a plan that defines the transformation that your business needs by showing the opportunities and problems. Map out a path through setting goals and specific strategies for digital marketing, including how you plan to integrate digital marketing into other business activities.
• Second, integrate the approved digital marketing plan into the general marketing strategy as a core activity, but the integration does not warrant separate planning, except for the tactics.

Many businesses are using digital marketing without a strategic approach and getting excellent results from their search, email, or social media marketing. However, they are potentially missing opportunities for better targeting or optimization and are suffering from the other challenges we have listed below.

Google only loves you when everyone else loves you first. – Wendy

If you do not have a digital marketing strategy, or maybe you want to review which business issues are important to include within a strategic review, we have set out the ten most common problems that we observed from organizations that do not have a properly laid out strategy.

Once again, do you have a digital marketing strategy in 2021? If not, read on.

Ten reasons you may need a digital marketing strategy in 2021?

1. Aimlessly drifting

   Most companies without a digital marketing strategy do not have smart strategic goals for what they want to achieve online to attain new customers or cementing their relationships with existing customers.

   If you do not have set goals and digital marketing objectives, the chances of dedicating enough resources towards your goals are low. You cannot test through analytics to know if you are achieving your set targets.

2. Inadequate knowledge of your target audience

   Without thorough research, it is easy to underestimate customer demand for online services. It is difficult to understand your online marketplace; the dynamics differ from traditional marketing channels with different customer profiles and behaviour, competitor activity, propositions, and options for marketing communications.

   There are tools available that help to find the level of customer demand, by doing a search gap analysis using Google Keyword Planner to see how you are tapping into the intent of searchers to attract them to your platforms, or how many people are interested in your products or services you could reach through Facebook analytics.

3. Losing out to competitors

   If you are not committing enough resources to your digital marketing activities and you are using an ad hoc approach without clearly defined objectives and strategies, then your competitors will eat a sizeable chunk of your digital lunch!

4. Lack of online value proposition

   A clearly outlined online customer value proposition tailored to your different target audience will help you differentiate your online service, encouraging existing and new customers to engage and stay loyal. Developing a content marketing strategy is key to achieving this for many organizations since the content captivates your audiences through different channels like a Search Engine Optimisation, Social Media Marketing, Email Marketing, and on your blog.

5. Audience Behavior

   Most people think it is easy to measure results when you are using digital marketing mediums. But tools like Google Analytics and similar tools can only show you the number of visits and not what your visitors think about your products and online service delivery. There are other tools that you can use to get website user feedback to identify your shortcomings and address them.

6. The disintegration of marketing activities

   The structure of your digital marketing function in your organization can determine whether it will be successful. Most organizations structure digital marketing activities in silos by having a specialist in digital marketing or a separate digital agency. But of course, it is less effective when disintegrated from the traditional marketing activities.

   At 800 Digital, we recommend developing an integrated digital marketing strategy and making complete digital marketing activities part of your marketing plan and part of business as usual.

7. Inadequate resources

   Organizations devote inadequate resources to both planning and executing digital marketing activities. There is likely to be a lack of specific specialist digital marketing skills in-house, which makes it complex to respond to competitive threats effectively.

8. Wasting money and time through duplication

   Some organizations have enough resources devoted to their digital marketing activities, but because of a poorly structured digital marketing function. You will see different parts of the marketing organization purchasing various tools or using various agencies for performing similar online tasks.

9. Inability to catch up or stay ahead

   Top online brands like Amazon, Dell, and Google are effective at keeping up with alternative approaches to gain or keep their online audiences engaged. Continuous identification of new trends helps to maintain the relevance and effectiveness of your digital marketing strategy. Subscribing to information resources relevant to a range of digital marketing disciplines will ensure that the latest news, developments, and continuous delivery of ideas to you.

10. Lack of optimization

    Every company with a website will have analytics, but they do not have time to review and act on the analytics. Once your digital marketing strategy in 2021 enables you to get the fundamentals right, then you can progress with continuous improvement of the key aspects like search marketing, site user experience, email, and social media marketing.

So that’s our list of top 10 problems to avoid with a well-thought-through digital marketing strategy in 2021

These are powerful reasons for creating a digital strategy to transform your marketing. At 800 Digital, we have worked with many businesses and helped them to formulate and integrate digital marketing plans into their existing traditional marketing activities.