You've set ambitious growth targets for your business, but after the initial honeymoon period, the novelty and optimism have started wearing off: it's clear what you're doing is not going to be enough to get there.

Well, keep reading.

There's really only 3 possible ways your business is currently failing at using digital to positively affect your bottom line.

1. Your buyer personas cannot discover you

You know who your market is, but you're not giving them an opportunity to learn about you. You're using dated SEO tactics like keyword stuffing, not investing into good content, you're not active (or even present) on social media and not leveraging paid social.

Maybe you don't even have a responsive website in 2019! (It's possible, I've seen cases of this.)

All in all, you're virtually non-existent in the virtual world and rely solely on unpredictable referrals and word-of-mouth.

2. You don't offer your visitors an opportunity to convert

The basis of every good business strategy is a strong positioning statement. This means you're aware of who you serve and who you don't serve.

It's those people that are or will be a good fit in future that you should focus on in your digital strategy.

Make sure you are giving them an opportunity to engage with your business in a way that suits where they are at the moment.

This means creating conversion offers that suit their stage in the customer journey.

In-market leads should be able to book a demo, a free consultation and assessment or try out your product.

The explorers who are working on solving their pain points should be able to get some valuable advice from you in the form of a downloadable e-book, a content pillar page or a video.

3. You perform little to no nurturing of the leads

You might be converting the leads at a healthy rate, but once they are signed up, the 'music' stops. Their emails just sit there and you never attempt to engage them either by further educating them on their problem and possible solutions.

Or you might be immediately jumping into the hard sell, with no lead qualification going on and no personalization in your email marketing.

Speaking of which, when you do use email. you just spam everyone with a newsletter once per month and hope it sticks (and it rarely does).

If you recognize yourself in one or more of these 'boats', you will have a problem effectively using digital channels to reach your business goals.

This blog post appeared originally as a LinkedIn article on August 29 2019 here.