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…

Marketing is Like Sports Because…

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 6 of 7.

Our Digital Marketing Strategy Blueprint series so far has followed the entire digital marketing process from strategy development to events leading up to a launch. We’ve now reached the important point where the “on” switch is going to be flipped. It’s kick off time and I’ll compare why launching a marketing campaign is similar to opening day of your favorite sports team. Any sport. Any team.

Preparation: Offseason vs. Campaign Planning

During the offseason, coaches, trainers, and athletes have worked hard to get better, stronger, smarter, design plays, create strategies, and polish techniques.

Between campaigns (and often during), marketers are putting on their war paint by researching trends, identifying new technology, analyzing data, and putting strategies together that will create a championship digital marketing campaign.

Kick-off Time: Football Team vs. Digital Marketing Team

In football, the season launches when the kicker kicks the ball at the beginning of the first game. All the players are in formation, coaches are on the sideline guiding the tactics, and the crowd is an audience that will accept or reject your performance through boos or cheers. The season has begun!

In marketing, everything that we’ve discussed in our past blogs is the offseason that gets you ready to kick off your campaigns. It’s the planning, organizing, brainstorming, researching, and more.

An important thing to remember is who owns what tasks. Who are the players and what are their positions? Who will be launching emails? Who will click “Enabled” on your Google AdWords campaigns? Who will be the person responsible for tactical adjustments after the campaigns are live? What time and date will each of these different marketing channels activate? For example, will you start some chatter on your social media channels that lead up to a campaign launch? Will an email, search ad, Facebook ad, Twitter ad, and display ad all begin to run exactly at 10:00am EST? Or will you stagger the roll out by channel? These are things that should be taken care of in the planning process, but you’ll still need to have a person responsible to ensure that each channel launches as planned.

Evaluation: Film Reviews vs. Campaign Review

Let’s fast forward our football game. In days that follow the game, players and coaches will often review video footage from the previous game. They will analyze what they executed well and what was executed poorly. The video will show missed blocks and penalties, but also well thought-out plays that scored. The team learns where there were holes in their strategy and tactics. Then, they regroup later and strive to plug those holes and emerge better than before.

Back in marketing land, campaigns typically last much longer than a football game. Campaigns can last days, weeks, months, or sometimes years. An example of a campaign that lasts a day might be a company offering a “today only” pop-up deal. Even those types of campaigns take planning that feed into a strategy.

Nevertheless, it’s important for marketers to review their campaign performance during and after it concludes. This is where data and analytics provide immense value. You should have some idea how your campaigns are doing, whether it’s on a daily or weekly basis. Waiting until the end of the month may be too long. The “set it and forget it” approach to digital marketing is one that will result in less than optimized campaigns that will minimize return on investment. 

This campaign performance review is where your marketing strategy comes full circle. Most likely, campaign performance data will span across different platforms and tools due to the fragmentation of marketing channels. A good idea would be to create a centralized dashboard or scorecard that displays overall KPIs (as we outlined in the first blog) and a few performance metrics from the different marketing channels. Digital strategists will be able to take this data and determine where holes existed in strategy and tactics, discover what worked well, and make better decisions to either correct the course of existing campaigns or strengthen future campaigns.

A post-campaign write-up can be a valuable historical document. This would be a simple, one page document that would be similar to a case study. It would review the goals of the campaign, the approach, the pros and cons, and other insights. Since people change jobs or leave companies, it provides the documented record of campaign successes and failures. This can be used as reference to aid in future decision making, and also a debriefing document for people who assume new roles on the marketing team. It’s worth the extra effort to create this document because it can save a lot of time and money down the road.

The Wrap Up

So it makes sense why marketing is like sports, right? Now it’s time to huddle the players and draw up those game-winning plays!

This blog wraps up the sixth of a seven-part series focused on digital strategy. By now, you have all the information you need to build a solid framework around your digital marketing strategy. If you need help during any or all points in the process, you have a partner in Ampla. Just give us a shout. In the meantime, check back soon for our final blog in this series entitled, “3 Reasons Your Digital Strategy Will #Fail,” as we discuss the traps that will steal your success away before you can even taste it.

What are some tips and tricks you use to implement and report on the success of your marketing programs?

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

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