Do you actually need a digital marketing strategy? Seven signs you do

You need a digital marketing strategy if three or more of the seven signs below are true for your business. One or two are worth fixing on their own, but they don't call for a full plan. Where three or more are true, the problem is rarely too little activity: the business posts, boosts, tweaks the website and tries a bit of SEO. What's missing is a plan that joins it all up: who to reach, with what message, through which few channels, and how to tell whether it's working. You can write a first version yourself in an afternoon.

1. You can't say which channel brings in customers

If someone asked where your last ten customers came from and you'd have to guess, you're spending blind. A strategy starts by tracing leads back to their source, so you know what to double down on and what to cut, and the reports that tell you take an afternoon to set up.

The simplest version needs no software at all: ask every new customer how they heard of you, and write it down. After a few months, that list is often more revealing than any dashboard.

2. You're doing a bit of everything

A bit of social, a few ads, and a newsletter that goes out whenever someone remembers: it all feels like marketing, but spreading a small budget thinly across every channel usually means none of them gets enough attention to work. Strategy is as much about what you stop doing as what you start.

3. Your message changes depending on who writes it

If your website says one thing, your ads another and your sales conversations a third, customers get mixed signals. A strategy settles the core message first, and then every channel carries it. Agreeing one sentence internally fixes more of this than people expect.

4. You react to competitors instead of planning

A competitor launches a promotion, so you launch one. They start a podcast, so you start thinking about one. Reactive marketing is exhausting and rarely effective. A plan gives you the confidence to ignore the noise, because you've already decided what you're doing and why.

5. You're about to spend real money

Hiring an agency, rebuilding the website and committing to a paid ads budget are exactly the moments to have a strategy in place. Planning first is far cheaper than fixing an expensive mistake later, and it gives whoever you hire a clear brief to work to.

6. Enquiries are flat, however busy you are

If the effort has gone up and the enquiries haven't, more effort won't fix it. The problem is usually one of three things: the wrong people are being reached, the right people are given no reason to choose you, or they arrive and something on the website stops them. A strategy is how you find out which, before you spend more.

7. Something is changing

A new service, a new area, a price change, a new competitor or a founder stepping back from sales can each change who you're trying to reach or what you need to say. Marketing designed for the old situation will keep doing the old job.

When you don't need one yet

Some businesses don't need a formal strategy just yet.

• If one channel is working and you're at capacity, the priority is delivering, not marketing. Keep doing what works, and write the plan when you want to grow again.
• If you have no customers yet, find the first few directly, through conversations, your network and one channel tested properly. The strategy comes from what those first customers teach you.
• If the problem is clearly elsewhere, such as pricing, capacity or the sales follow-up, fix that first. No marketing plan survives a business problem it wasn't designed to solve.

What a useful strategy contains

It doesn't need to be a 60-page document. The best strategies fit on a few pages and get used every week, and each section answers one question:

Notice what isn't in the table: a long list of tactics, a brand manifesto, or a year of social media posts. Those can come later. The strategy is the set of decisions that tells you which tactics are worth doing.

Writing a first version in an afternoon

You can get a long way on your own with information you already have. Set aside three or four hours and work through these steps.

1. List your last 20 customers and, for each one, how they found you, what they bought and roughly what they were worth. Patterns appear quickly, and one source, one kind of customer or one service usually stands out.
2. Open Google Analytics and look at where your website visitors come from and which of them get in touch. If enquiries aren't tracked there, note that as the first job in your plan.
3. Open Google Search Console and look at the searches your site appears for. Are they the searches your best customers would use?
4. Check your Google Business Profile performance for calls, direction requests and website clicks, if customers find you locally.
5. Search for your main service as a customer would, and note who appears and what they promise.
6. Write your one sentence: what you do, for whom, and why you rather than the alternatives.
7. Choose two or three channels where your best customers already are, and give each one a job.
8. Write the next 90 days as a list of jobs in order, starting with whatever fixes the biggest gap you found.
9. Choose two or three numbers to review each month, such as enquiries, cost per enquiry and how many enquiries become customers.

It won't be perfect, and it doesn't need to be. A plan you wrote, understand and will review in three months beats a perfect one you never read. For somewhere to write it, the one-page marketing plan has a free template and a worked example. When you work out the budget, start from your own numbers rather than a percentage.

When to pay for one

Doing it yourself works well if you have the time, the data is reasonably clean and you trust your own reading of it. Paying for one makes sense when:

• you don't have the hours, or you keep meaning to and not doing it;
• the data is messy, contradictory or missing, and needs someone to untangle it;
• you're too close to the business to see what customers see;
• you're about to hire an agency or a marketer and want to give them a clear brief;
• the stakes are high enough that a second pair of senior eyes is cheap by comparison.

In a paid strategy, look for a fixed price, a clear list of what you'll receive, and a plan short enough to use, and be wary of anything priced by the page. We publish our prices for every service in what marketing costs in the UK, and if you're comparing quotes, how much a marketing consultant costs in the UK sets out what a strategy costs and how the different ways of pricing it compare.

A quick check

Answer each one for today. If three or more are a yes, a strategy is worth the time.

• I could not say with confidence where my last ten customers came from.

  YesNo
  How to tell

  Write down your last ten customers and how each one found you, without looking anything up. If you have to guess at more than one or two, this is true.

  Takes ten minutes. Covered in The only five GA4 reports you need.

• We are active on more channels than we can do properly.

  YesNo
  How to tell

  List every channel you use and when each last had proper attention, not a token post. If any has gone weeks without it, or exists mainly because you feel you should be there, this is true.

  Takes ten minutes. Covered in full above.

• Our website, ads and sales conversations describe us differently.

  YesNo
  How to tell

  Put your homepage headline, your latest ad and the way you describe the business on the phone side by side. If a stranger could think they came from three different businesses, this is true.

  Takes fifteen minutes. Covered in Can you explain what you do in one sentence? How to fix your messaging.

• Most of our recent marketing decisions were reactions to something.

  YesNo
  How to tell

  Look at the last three things you started, such as an offer, a new channel or a campaign. If each began because a competitor did something similar or a supplier suggested it, this is true.

  Takes ten minutes. Covered in full above.

• We are about to spend a meaningful amount on marketing or a hire.

  YesNo
  How to tell

  This is true if you are close to hiring an agency or a marketer, rebuilding the website, or committing to an ads budget you would notice losing.

  Covered in Agency, freelancer or fractional?.

• Enquiries have not grown, even though effort has.

  YesNo
  How to tell

  Compare enquiries over the last three months with the same three months last year, alongside the time and money spent. If the effort is up and the enquiries are level or down, this is true.

  Takes half an hour, if enquiries are recorded somewhere. Covered in full above.

• Something important about the business has changed in the last year.

  YesNo
  How to tell

  This is true if you have added or dropped a service, moved into a new area, changed your prices, gained a serious new competitor or changed who handles sales in the last year.

  Covered in full above.

If you'd rather have it done for you, our 90-day marketing plan covers everything in the table above in about three weeks, for a fixed £2,500, and the plan is yours to keep either way.