Is it time to review your digital strategy?
The answer is yes. No business is perfect...
The most successful brands continually measure and pivot their strategy, based on the ever-changing customer and business needs. There is always room for improvement, especially with digital moving so incredibly fast.
We are talking about an entire digital strategy here, not just your digital marketing. Digital strategies should use technology to improve business performance, whether that's enhancing products or recreating current processes to generate efficiencies. This could include changes to business models, as new technology makes it possible for innovative companies to provide services that weren't previously possible.
A digital strategy in place is good but will cause more harm than good if not regularly optimised. Regular updates should be made to ensure your business is making the most of new customer behaviours, marketing tools, data, efficient technology and strategies.
By reviewing your digital strategy you begin future-proofing your business by identifying opportunities and upcoming challenges. If you regularly stay on top of your strategy and update them accordingly, you will better serve your customers, ensuring increasing success. Furthermore, you may find that your digital strategy is not merging or working well together. You may need to look into integrating your whole digital strategy. This article will share some reasons as to why you should review your strategy this year.
Average Results
If your business's digital strategy is ticking along in the background and creating moderate success, this could be the sign you need to take some time for a complete digital review. Being average in today’s online world is not good enough - it’s conforming to the masses at best. But the most successful brands that spring to mind pave the way in their sectors, right? You need to determine areas of improvement to grow your online presence and maximise growth. It’s easy to become so close to your digital products, that you’re unaware of the impact it’s having on business growth. A review could give you that objective perspective that uncovers the gaps you need plug, to become an industry leader.
Time Consuming Tasks
Digital processes can replace normal manual processes which means operations are faster, smoother, and more efficient. By automating and using digital in your business operations, you can reduce costs by up to 15% and improve efficiency - Mckinsey. New digital technology also allows companies to create new business models and revenue sources.
By reviewing and analysing current successes, you can utilise digital to help provide a better customer experience and improve customer touchpoints. Customers may use new sales channels, such as e-commerce or social media networks or gain a total brand experience on a website.
Lack of Data
Data is the best way to drive results as you have clear indicators of your previous successes and mistakes. Using all the data you have possible is key to understanding the next steps needed. If your business lacks data, it is time to look at the best ways to track and measure your strategies and consider investing in specialist MarTech.
Tools such as Google Analytics, SemRush, Drift, HotJar and Crazy Egg are all easy to help you determine successful and better practices.
In the digital world, change is the only constant. Using data to analyse changes within your business can help you find new ways to communicate to your audience and find areas that need improvements, such as customer experience, website features, or sales funnels.
Falling Behind Competition
With technology changing rapidly, it can seem challenging to keep up and be ahead of your competitors. Digital reviews can help to analyse and find where your business needs to improve to take you one step closer to being an industry leader. By making sure you are ahead of the curve, you may find that you create groundbreaking changes to your industry by making the most of the digital services and software available. Everyone wants to create sector envy, right?
Full Capacity Marketing Team
Marketing is a vast job and entails many areas and overlaps with many departments, such as Product Teams, IT and Sales. Keeping up with all the aspects needed for digital success and getting buy-in can be tricky, but reviewing and optimising will enable you and your marketing team to stay focused, which is crucial to steady business growth and proving return on investment. Finding relevant technologies to help automate some of your marketing teams tasks will relieve stress and increase productivity.
Your marketing efforts will always have long term goals that need to be achieved. Thinking about the overarching goals can be overwhelming especially with the 100’s of to-do’s on a daily basis to reach these goals such as SEO, PPC, Content & E-mail Marketing. Having a clear and refreshed digital strategy can break down the areas that need to be addressed and organise them by priority to achieve these long term goals.
Summary
Reviews can be a time-consuming process, however, they can save your business and your marketing team, time, budget and effort on failing strategies. Reviewing can guarantee steps towards a successful system that enables effective business growth. You should review the process to spot mistakes and, in the end, have the most robust strategy in place to benefit long term outcomes.
If you want to speak to a Strategist on where best to start with your digital strategy, you can use this tool below to book a 30-minute chat.
