DIGITAL marketing continues to be an area in which many businesses struggle with figuring out just how to leverage it to help them grow their business and build a community. It is critical that businesses get this right, seeing that every single one of your customers uses some form of technology that can be employed to get in front of them and provide value.

Digital marketing plays a pivotal role in the success and growth of businesses in today’s interconnected world. It’s like having a megaphone that amplifies your brand’s voice, enabling you to reach a vast audience with just a click. From small start-ups to multinational corporations, digital marketing offers a multitude of benefits that are hard to ignore.

It not only helps businesses establish their online presence but also drives brand awareness, boosts customer engagement, increases website traffic, generates leads, and ultimately converts those leads into loyal customers.

In this digital age when everyone is just a few taps away from their smartphone or computer, harnessing the power of digital marketing is the key to staying relevant, competitive, and connected to your target audience.

Let’s dive into five key reasons why businesses struggle with digital marketing, and you can use this as a bit of a checklist of the areas you need to ensure you sort out for your business.

1) Upskilling – The speed of change that is happening within the digital marketing industry is happening at a rate we have never seen before. Everyday there are updates, new platforms, tools, strategies that we need to keep up to date with. Companies in the Caribbean have been hiring many people with experience in ad creation or traditional media buying so as to head up their digital marketing departments but are now saddled with people who don’t have the necessary skills to aid them in their digital marketing journey, nor are they upskilling to get the new skills to help the companies.

2) Too Many Ads, No Content – Because companies are packed with folks who are great at ads, they are littering social media channels for your business with ads. Your audience is conditioned to ignore ads in general and aren’t coming on social media to make purchases. Don’t get on social media and post static images of your product or a video with someone just listing out the features of your product; your content needs to be focused on addressing people’s problems or desires within your industry. Every product or service has a wide assortment of valuable content you can create that goes beyond an ad.

3) Marketing Requires Industry Expertise – When your audience follows a business on social media, listens to their podcast, watches videos on their YouTube channel, or subscribes to their email list, they do so because they want content that will help them solve their problems and help achieve their desires. To provide that kind of content the people who handle your content need to have intimate knowledge of your industry. You can’t create valuable content about insurance if you have no idea about the industry. Far too often we are outsourcing our marketing efforts to freelancers, agencies, and influencers who have no idea about the ins and outs of our industries. Take all your years of experience, look at all the questions you get asked from your customers, and turn that into content across the various digital channels.

4) No Defined Strategy – There is no clearly defined strategy as to what you are doing, no goals, no objectives, no KPIs, minimal (if any) market research, ineffective targeting, no data gathering. Remember, digital goes way beyond one or two social media platforms. This would be a great time to connect with a digital strategist who can sit down with your organisation and build a complete strategy for your brand.

5) Lack of Community Building – This is where businesses drop the ball the most. They treat social media as just another place to sell. They aren’t focused on building a community, a place where they can connect, have two-way conversations, and become a resource for their audience to learn about any and everything related to their respective industries. If you focused on building a community you would stop trying to hard sell at every opportunity, and it would become easier to build out the other digital channels like YouTube, a podcast, or an email newsletter because you would now be focused on providing informative information to your community.

The biggest takeaway I want you get from this article is to stop trying to sell. You don’t need to outsource your marketing and you don’t even need to hire influencers to spread your message. Focus on building a community, becoming a resource for your audience, and create conversations amongst all your digital channels. You will find that you get more success, and that marketing becomes much easier for your organisation.

Keron Rose is a digital strategist who works with Caribbean businesses to build their digital presence. Learn more at KeronRose.com or listen to the Digipreneur FM podcast on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or Google Podcast.