One aspect of digital marketing in 2021 that’s become clear to experts across the field is that there can no longer be a disconnect between your brand’s strategy and your marketing actions.
2021 will undoubtedly seal the lid on vague, idealized marketing strategies of the past, as data-driven techniques and verifiable metrics have become the new standard. Not only does your marketing strategy need to be laid out in actionable steps this year, you’ll need to have a plan as to how you can achieve each goal to ensure your company’s growth.
Thinking Vs. Doing in Digital Marketing Strategy
Most business owners who begin to look deeply at growing their company online find that a goal-based approach will serve them well. It’s great to set a larger goal for your year-end growth, and many even find assurance in setting specific numbers to by which to measure their growth.
For example, you may want to increase the traffic to your website, or the follower count on your brand’s Instagram, by 150 percent in 12 months. So, the obvious next step is to divide the growth goal by 3 or 12, to have an even quarterly or monthly progression of smaller goals, right? Perhaps not.
This linear approach works well for maintenance strategies, where your goal is to sustain a specific number of new sales or clients over a stretch of time to keep your business afloat. Actual growth, however, is often exponential. Your plan of action should account for the fact that the initial phase of any marketing campaign is often the slowest, and that conversions happen more rapidly as your audience expands by non-linear factors due to the sharing of content online.
This is one of the biggest areas of disagreement between ‘thinking’ and ‘doing’ in online marketing, but it’s often delivered in the form of good news for brand owners that are prepared for exponential growth results.
Once your marketing plan accounts for realistic growth patterns, you can begin to make an actionable strategy that you won’t be forced to abandon mid-way through the year.
Another “Thinking Vs. Doing” Digital Marketing Pitfall
Aside from failing to plan for the natural, exponential course of growth through online marketing, there’s another mistake of years-past that even experienced marketers need to watch for: allowing a marketing plan to go unchallenged. With data-driven strategies now available to professional marketers, there’s no excuse for using the old “throwing everything at the wall” approach in 2021.
A reputable digital marketing agency has mounds of data to support their strategic approaches, and can custom tailor a marketing plan for you based on your specific niche, your current metrics and sales numbers, and the amount of growth expected in your area of business. They have tested and proven different strategies in dozens or hundreds of areas of marketing and know what works best for each type of company.
Armchair marketing intuition did work well in the early Internet and allowed companies to find which advertising plans would best suit their businesses. Using that approach today would be akin to a mechanic taking your entire car apart to diagnose a simple electrical problem that a handheld code scanner could detect in seconds; it’s wasteful of resources and counter-productive to your goals.
Having a data-backed strategy that can be peered into by logs and records and other figures allows you to challenge the idea that your current plan is optimal and make any necessary adjustments.
Creating realistic, yet optimistic, goals is an essential step in any online marketing strategy. In order to realize those goals, however, you need to be prepared for the growth that comes, and you’ll need a plan that is backed by data and research. The best way to accomplish this is to reach out to a professional marketing agency like 1Source Media Group to see which strategies would work best for your particular business or brand.
Digital strategy in 2021 doesn’t work without clear alignment between the thinking and the doing
