You follow the top marketing blogs. You’re on top of the latest digital trends. You work tirelessly on your brand’s marketing initiatives, and yet you’re still not getting the results you want.

What are you doing wrong? We’ve compiled the top 5 easy mistakes even experienced marketers make that could be holding you back.

5 Common Digital Strategy Mistakes

Confusing tactics with marketing strategy:

As a marketer, you may manage social media channels and post blogs, invest in paid search, optimize your website or launch brand awareness campaigns. These are all incredibly important, but none of them is your strategy. They are tactics that execute your strategy.

Still confused? Here’s an example: When Facebook announced it would become a mobile-first company, that was the strategy. All of the social giant’s activities that support that goal – including, most recently, telling advertisers Facebook will favor faster-loading ads – are the tactics.

Even nationally known thought leaders often refer to tactics as strategies, so it’s no wonder so many marketers follow their example. If you’re guilty as charged, it’s never too late to define clear business objectives to guide your strategy.

Executing without clear goals:

Your digital strategy marries two elements – your marketing goals and business objectives – to create a clear game plan. You need both. Don’t be tempted to jump on the latest marketing fads and trends without a solid reason why they benefit your brand. Remember: You want to act, but always with intention.

A good example of a clear marketing goal is increasing traffic to your blog by 10,000 visitors in one year. This goal is stronger when it also supports a business objective. If your brand’s goal is simply to increase sales, you need to prove how investing money and manpower into more blog traffic will help.

Making decisions without data:

At Charles River Interactive, this is one of the most important beliefs we hold dear: You must base your decisions on real, hard, up-to-date data. The best results come from combining out-of-the-box creative thinking with the power of data-driven decisions. Understanding your web analytics is the key to making smarter decisions that reach the right people.

For example, before you decide to re-write even one webpage, you should be able to answer questions such as:

• How many users visited this page over the previous six months? (traffic)
• How much time did they spend on the page? (bounce rate)
• How did they find this content?

The answers tell you what to change about the page and inform why and even how you should do it.

Implementing best practices without a plan:

So you’re following best practices for SEO and implemented title tags, Meta descriptions, and H1s to improve on-page optimization. But you’re still not getting the results you want. Success in the organic results is no longer about implementing best practices; instead it’s about the overarching strategy behind it. Take the time to think about what content will resonate with your target audience and build your on-page elements around those. We work with many clients to develop on-page optimization efforts based around a strategic plan.

Basing audience on assumptions:

One of the most important questions we ask clients is, Who is your target audience? If you don’t know – or if your answer isn’t specific enough – it can delay or derail successful marketing initiatives. If you’re speaking to a general audience, or even targeting a pool that’s too small, it may be time to invest in marketing research to understand your key demographic.

Why is this important? It saves you from investing in Twitter campaigns or Facebook ads only to find out your core consumers aren’t heavy users of these platforms. Knowing your target audience helps you reach the right people, where they are, with the right message.

Interested in learning more about marketing trends? Check out Charles River Interactive’s blog View from the Charles:
Mobile First Strategy: What You Need to Know
7 Email Marketing Best Practices
Why Brand Advocacy Matters

Want more information? Get more details on Charles River Interactive’s SEO and PPC service offerings or contact us today.