Most Critical Mistakes That You Should Avoid In Your Digital Marketing Strategy

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Just couple of years ago, digital marketers just needed to create a strategy around email, pay-per-click, and SEO.  Today, the marketing options and tools available to you have expanded exponentially, and with them, the chances of making a misstep.

Ambiguous and/or Wrong Objectives

Clearly understanding where you’re going guarantees that you’ll get there.  Objectives serve as the compass for insuring that a strategy’s tactics are pointed in the right direction.

According to a recent study conducted by SiriusDecisions, 43% of C-Level decision-makers cite “Money Saved” as their key ROI calculation, with competitive impact and time saved acting as important secondary indicators. Digital marketing strategists can lower resistance and gain support for their plans by clearly aligning their digital strategy with these factors.

Vague Performance Metrics

Managing a digital marketing strategy without agreed-upon performance metrics is like piloting a plane in the fog without instruments.  While numbers aren’t as sexy as flashy ad creative, they are still the foundation of smart digital strategy.

We encourage our clients to agree upon a core set of metrics that will be used to evaluate their digital marketing strategy.  These metrics can be quantitative or qualitative.  The important part is that they signal if the strategy is winning or failing.

Failing to Get Broad Stakeholder Buy-In

Our client, Travel Michigan, has been recognized as having the leading social media and digital marketing program in the state tourism industry.  While their exceptional web and social media activities deserve credit, their real secret is the team’s ability to get buy-in from multiple stakeholders.  Once a month, every person with marketing responsibilities gathers to discuss and confirm their buy-in on the marketing and digital strategy.

Failure to achieve buy-in results in fragmented strategy that is boxed into silos.  Worse, instead of working together, stakeholders are incentivized to compete for resources and hoard important information.

While a small team can write the digital strategy, executive management should be ready to “walk it around” the organization to drive consensus and cooperation.

Anemic Tactics

In many ways, creating a digital marketing strategy is the easy part.  Strategy lives at a high-level and doesn’t take into account the day-to-day details required for it’s execution.

The hard part starts when the strategy has to be translated into cost-effective tactics that deliver results.  Unfortunately, this is where most digital marketing strategies falter, or worse, the strategy is confused with tactics.

At Fluency, we focus on the transition between strategy and tactics and offer best practices for making sure that the “lieutenants” are crystal clear about the direction the “Generals” are heading.  We recommend that the strategy creator is accountable for the development of tactics to make sure that nothing gets lost in the transition.