Why do many digital marketing strategies fail? There are a variety of reasons, including misaligned goals, not enough budget, or even lack of consistency. The truth is, there is a lot that goes into strategy creation, and it’s often easy to miss some of the details.

Aside from budget constraints or inconsistent execution, many marketing strategies fall short because gaps go unnoticed. The issue here is that these gaps likely aren’t obvious, at least at first. They tend to multiply over time.

The goal, then, is to identify and address any gaps that occur before they get to the point where they are negatively impact results. Here’s a look at how you can do that.

Understand What Marketing Gaps Look Like

It’s important to understand what marketing gaps look like so that you can make strategic changes before they get worse. They usually happen over time as old strategies continue without proper assessment.

For example, if you had a campaign perform well, you could continue to run it, even if results taper off. Without regular assessment, it would be easy to miss that results are dipping. Over time, the results could get even worse until the campaign is no longer effective.

The ideal situation here would be to have recognized the dip when it first started and then adjusted the campaign accordingly. Instead, the program was allowed to continue, which created a misalignment between strategy and reality.

In general, gaps tend to appear in obvious ways, but only if you know what to look for and are cued into small changes. You’re looking for areas where the results are showing issues like unclear priorities, decreased results, and inconsistent messaging.

Gaps occur when teams are busy, but they don’t necessarily have the results to show for it. If a gap is identified early, strategic changes can be made before any real impact is felt.

Align Your Strategy with Business Goals

One of the most common marketing gaps that occurs is when the marketing strategy doesn’t align with business goals. A clear sign of this is that the marketing team is constantly busy and has plenty to do, but the results just aren’t there.

Misalignment can become obvious here by observing what kinds of metrics the team uses to measure success. If they are somewhat vague and oriented towards the big picture, like traffic or engagement, this could be a sign that there is a marketing gap.

Sure, these metrics are important to assess, but they don’t show the whole story. A lot of traffic isn’t meaningful if the traffic obtained hasn’t been properly targeted. Teams need to analyze other metrics that will show marketing’s real contribution to business goals, such as revenue and lead generation.

Marketing’s efforts need to be directly connected to the business’s outcomes. The goal here is to align marketing with business goals, and when this happens, it will be easier to prioritize how marketing uses its time.

Get to Know the Audience and Customer Journey

Addressing marketing gaps is about far more than aligning with business goals, although that is an important piece of the puzzle. Whether or not marketing truly understands the audience can also be another marketing gap.

Many teams assume they know their audience. To be fair to them, it could be that they knew the audience well at one time. Marketing teams often let too much time pass, however, before they consider if the needs of the audience have changed or not.

Outdated audience understanding can also impact the customer journey, which is directly tied to marketing’s understanding of the audience. As your understanding of the audience evolves, so should be your understanding of the customer journey.

This is where gaps occur, and both should be revisited regularly to prevent these gaps from occurring.

Make Gap Checks Part of Your Ongoing Strategy

Digital marketing strategy isn’t just “set and forget”. It evolves over time, yet marketing teams get so busy, they often forget to perform regular check-ins. At the same time, marketing gaps don’t appear overnight. There are early signs that can be addressed, if only marketing notices them.

It’s a good idea to treat gap analysis as an ongoing habit. The goal should be to regularly review strategy, performance, and audience behavior. This way, you can make small, strategic adjustments over time, rather than feeling like you need to scramble once the gap had been going on for too long.

The bottom line is that marketing strategies don’t always produce results because they were poorly designed. One of the main issues that marketing gaps are often going unnoticed. By understanding what a marketing gap looks like, teams can identify them early and make changes as needed, which helps with long-term results.

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