One in three businesses are unsure about their 2019 online strategy

In these cash-poor times, businesses are struggling to stay ahead of the competition — and many of them are missing opportunities to talk to their customers.

UK-based digital marketing agency Marketing Signals carried out a survey to find out what business leaders planned for the year ahead.

It surveyed 1,021 UK workers to find out what opportunities they were missing.

The survey showed that over one in three (36 percent) business leaders are unsure of their digital marketing strategy for 2019.

The top five ways businesses are missing out on opportunities to improve their digital marketing performance are:

• One in three (37 percent) of respondents admitted they are not answering potential customer questions adequately enough on their own website.
• This was followed by virtually one in three (32 percent) who said that they are not actively retargeting visitors to their website.This means that companies are missing the chance to market their businesses to users who have already engaged with their brand.
• Almost three out of ten (29 percent) said that their website is not fully mobile responsive, which can have an adverse impact on conversion rate as well as the overall user experience.
• Over one in five (22 percent) said they were not actively optimising their Google My Business listing. They are missing an opportunity to gain more customers, particularly from users who are searching from the local area.
• Almost one in five (19 percent) said that they were aware that their site did not load quickly enough.

Gareth Hoyle, managing director at MarketingSignals.com said: 

“The research shows how there are a number of missed opportunities for companies when it comes to their digital marketing activity, particularly with regard to organic performance. This is to some extent understandable as algorithms are regularly updating and it can be hard for business owners to keep up with the very latest developments.”

Failing to improve digital marketing performance could be extremely harmful to the businesses’ bottom line if issues are not improved quickly.

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Businesses should concentrate their effort to keep abreast of the all online activities their company does and optimise this wherever possible.

Search engine algorithm updates can present both dangers and opportunities for business owners. Techniques that were once understood and believed to be common practice can now lead to search engine penalties.

And in the age when most of us rely on Google to find anything — dropping down the list of search results could be a very bad idea indeed.

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Article source: https://www.zdnet.com/article/one-in-three-businesses-are-unsure-about-their-2019-online-strategy/#ftag=RSSbaffb68