Determining Strategy in E-Commerce

Do you have a strategy? A strategy that explains what you are trying to accomplish, how it’s going to be accomplished, and how you measure success? If not, then you’ve got a problem. A strategy is not having a Facebook strategy or Instagram strategy. Those are channels. Now, what you do on Facebook, such as making a post, that is a tactic. A strategy is the singular, overarching principle that drives how to use tactics on specific channels and why. This is evidenced by the frustration people express about social media marketing. Two of the most common questions are, how do I know which social media to use? And how will I know it works? That’s a question of ROI, return on investment. Finding a return on investment of marketing is difficult without a strategy. This is evidenced by the number of searches for how to find social media ROI. In this graph from Google showing how people search and the related terms, we can see that people searching for the return or the ROI of social media marketing is nearly as high as the amount of people searching for how to do social media marketing. In content marketing, it’s very similar to social media marketing in that no one seems to be sure how effective it is. In one study, it was found that 50% of content does not drive any engagement. It’s the age-old problem of half of my advertising doesn’t work, I just don’t know which half. But it’s no wonder. In asking marketers about strategy, only 32% said that they had a documented strategy that was communicated across their organization. 20% had no strategy at all. And about half had a verbal strategy, but nothing was written down or clearly communicated to the organization. I think we all know what happens to information if it is not written down or communicated clearly. This is why 46% of marketers cite strategy as their number one obstacle to effective marketing. Not only that. When strategy’s a problem, then it leads to other problems. Anything that supports strategy suffers, such as training. How can you train your marketing team effectively when you don’t know what you want to achieve? And of course it’s hard to find a return on investment if you don’t know what you’re doing or why you’re doing it. And it also exposes the metrics you are using to measure success if you aren’t defining what success looks like. Have you ever been distracted by something shiny? Like a penny on the sidewalk? It immediately distracts us because it’s shiny, but it’s usually worthless. This is what I call Shiny Object Syndrome in marketing. You’ll know you are suffering from this when you or your company get distracted by the latest fads, headlines, apps, or technology. When you look at a single tactic or channel to provide results rather than your total plan or you ignore internal data, but you rely on external headlines for decision making. In other words, when you are externally directed, you allow factors, such as headlines, media, and fads to drive your decisions.

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