Having a digital marketing strategyis extremely essential for all businesses who are planning to cultivate their business’ growth through the digital dimension.

One of the common challenges is where to start doing the digital marketing plan. Another challenge is the sheer scope and scale of digital marketing. There are so many great digital marketing techniques ranging from search, social and email marketing to improve the digital experience of your website.

Within each digital marketing technique, there are lots of specific tactics that are important in order to achieve certain metrics depending on your goal, that’s why they have to be evaluated on a timely basis — from content and email automation to retargeting, organic and paid search.

Here’s Smart Insight’s recommended approach for benchmarking a strong digital marketing strategy which can incredibly help you start establishing your own digital marketing plan today.

Every business needs to create a digital marketing strategy because:

You don’t clearly know your online audience well.

It’s often said that digital is the “easiest to measure”. But you need to use other forms of website user feedback tools to identify your weak points and then address them further on in your digital marketing plan.

You’re not optimizing.

Every company with a website will have analytics, but many don’t ensure that their teams make or have the time to review and act on them.

Once a strategy enables you to get the basics right, then you can progress to continuous improvement of the key aspects like search marketing, site user experience, email, and social media marketing.

You don’t have a powerful value proposition.

A clearly defined online customer value proposition tailored to different target customerswill help you differentiate your online service encouraging existing and new customers to engage initially and stay loyal.

Developing a competitive content marketing strategy is key to this for many organizations since the content is what engages your audiences through different channels like search, social, email marketing and on your blog.

Existing and start-up competitors will gain market share.

If you’re not devoting enough resources to digital marketing or you’re using the traditionalapproach with no clearly defined strategies, then your competitors will surely get ahead of you.