3 Reasons Why Your Digital Strategy is Failing

Let’s go through some simple objectives and paradigm shifts that can help your digital strategy achieve hard business goals.

When you think about your digital strategy, do you have an end game? More sales or leads? More qualified engagements? Are you chasing metrics like “share of voice“, but haven’t quite figured out what that actually does for your bottom line?

Let’s go through some simple objectives and paradigm shifts that can help your digital strategy to achieve hard business goals.

1. Your First Priority Isn’t Converting More Visitors

How much do you spend on your digital media? How much would it cost to audit the website conversion forms or e-commerce checkout and to implement these improvements for easing these processes? What percentage of your budget does that equate to? What if that small percentage of your budget could (and should) increase your online conversions and increase the value of every person who visits your site by anywhere from 10 to 150 percent? Conversion optimization is an obvious investment, unless you’re not a fan of generating more business for your company at a low cost.

Let’s face it, for most websites, the digital team built a “functional” form or checkout experience and the user experience team spent way too much time on the homepage. When a user encounters an error while trying to complete the most important task that they can on your site, they typically get error messages and instructions on how to fix it that are written by the same IT team that brag about failing the Turing test. If you do anything next year, invest in increasing the value of every visitor.

Think about the following math: each conversion from a display campaign with a .05 percent CTR (click-through rate), at a $3 CPM (cost-per-impression), and a 1 percent onsite conversion rate, will cost you $6,000.

If you were able to make users not have to think while trying to give you their information and that on-site conversion rate jumped to 1.5 percent from some pretty easy enhancements, your cost per conversion will fall to $3,000. Every dollar spent now goes 50 percent farther. The great thing is you can keep optimizing everything from calls to action to your navigation to continue earning more from each visitor you’re already getting.

2. Don’t Do SEO? Start With The Basics

With Google’s major updates over the past few months, now is the time that you must get your SEO program moving. You’ve been doing SEO, you need to ensure that your strategy has been upgraded for the post Hummingbird world.

Many things have changed over the past few years and if you’ve not been keeping up to speed, you have most definitely fallen behind. Ensure every page that you’re allowing search engines have a purpose for search engines. Make sure that each page has a set purpose for your potential customers and that the page is optimized for the subjects that those customers use when looking for that aspect of your business. Do a deep dive into your keywords and ensure that you have content to support each keyword that should be driving relevant traffic. Take the steps necessary to keep search engines from wasting time on urls that they should not be crawling. Also, do a deep analysis of your backlinks. Negative SEO is gaining popularity in APAC and you need to be aware when a competitor is sinking your natural search rankings.

3. You Fear Making the Wrong Decision

The beauty of the Internet is its speed of change. Instantaneous response is going to be a large part of how brands will be built in the future (Remember the Oreo’s commercial during the Super Bowl blackout). For most organizations today, top level decision makers are just not adjusting to the tools and opportunities the speed of the digital age has provided to them.

Are there people screaming that moving your call to action on a page above the fold is against brand guidelines while the team responsible for actually getting conversions is begging for it? Test it. Just pull the trigger and do it, within a testing framework of course. Don’t worry about being wrong with a site change or with creative and get just get it live: the data will tell us very quickly if the changes achieved the target goals, then changes can be made extremely quickly to test another idea. This can be taken a step further and you can evolve into an “always be testing” philosophy.

Your digital marketing strategy will never be perfect, but understanding the speed of change the Internet has brought to marketing and then utilizing this speed of change to your advantage is going to be crucial to the future of your company’s marketing efforts.

Title image courtesy of Shutterstock.

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