But if you think that that’s where your digital marketing strategy ends, you are very wrong.

The ‘strategy’ part of ‘digital marketing strategy’ goes beyond making websites and social media accounts; it entails making your presence known in the online world using digital channels like Google AdWords and Content Marketing. It means understanding your target audience and having real-time interaction via the internet. It requires you to think about the future of your business, in both the long-term and short-term sense.

Now, you may be wondering, “Hey, why can’t I just wing it and learn from my mistakes? Why can’t that be my strategy?”

Well, it can be… if you are willing to spend your (limited) resources and time over mistakes. Not to mention, every mistake chips off a little bit from the reputation that you are trying so hard to build and maintain.

So, maybe ‘winging it’ is not the best digital marketing strategy.

Here are 10 reasons why a well thought out strategy is vital for the survival of your business in the digital age:

Every business needs to have a goal that you can work towards; this holds true even in digital marketing. Without a clear objective in place, you will be a little scattered. This scatteredness will, in one way or another, reflect in your online activities and customer interaction which might lead to your audience ditch you for your more coordinated competitors.

Having a good and optimized digital marketing strategy allows you to manage your digital initiatives seamlessly.

When coming up with a digital marketing strategy, you will need to do extensive, in-depth research, of not only your business but other businesses in your industry as well. Through this research, you will be able to figure out what features are unique to your business, what services do you offer that others (or most others) don’t.

Then you can put these features into words, formulate your brand voice and focus your marketing on it to get more traffic to your business.

Once you’ve figured out what you want to tell your audience about your business, you need to figure out how you’re going to get your message through to them.

Should you make videos to showcase your special features? Or is it better to take to blogging?

Figuring out the right digital channels to promote your business with helps you segregate your budget optimally. It also helps you decide whether you should invest in full or part-time employees or look into hiring a digital marketing firm.

Knowing about the social media platforms that work best for you is vital when coming up with a digital marketing strategy. After all, you don’t want to spend time over a platform that doesn’t yield you any traffic, or pour money into buying tools for ones that your target audience doesn’t frequent, do you?

Not everyone has accounts on every social media site and even if some do, they aren’t necessarily active on all of them. Also, people look for different content on different platforms. Linkedin Users like reading professional, yet interesting blogs related to their industry; but that kind of business talk ain’t gonna fly on more casual sites like Instagram where people go for a more chill-but-relatable vibe.

Having a digital marketing strategy is like having Google Maps; you have a well-charted map, complete with directions important landmarks, for the destination you want to go to. Even if you deviate from the mapped path, it shows you how to achieve the objective you started out with. This gives you the freedom to take on more risks and turn them into opportunities, allowing you to expand your reach beyond what you would without a strategy.

Big names in your industry have already gone digital, and chances are that most of your peers have as well. They have understood the importance of digital marketing strategies early on with the help of an entire team of experts dedicated solely to predicting the future in business based of stats and figures (R&D) and another professional team committed to coming up with dynamic marketing strategies.

So, a highly-optimized digital marketing strategy is the only thing that will help you be on par or better than your competition.

This doesn’t mean you pick up another company’s strategy and use it for your business; there’s really no point in doing that. Every business is different. Right from how it was started, to the goals, work culture, location, every aspect of every company differs to some degree. Not to mention, the target audience, while similar, is still different. This is why one company’s digital marketing strategy will not work with your business plan.

Without a digital marketing strategy in place, there is rarely any communication or coordination among or even within the different teams in a company, regardless of its size. This leads to the different departments not being able to work smoothly with the other as they don’t know and/or understand each other’s priorities and goals, creating an organizational silo, which gives rise to the risk of losing budget over different tools purchased by different parts of a department to achieve the same goals.

Outlining a digital marketing strategy avoids such situations by establishing roles and communication flow through the various teams in the company; every department and team member knows what their role is, what tools are purchased and what they are used for. This rids you the risk of duplicate purchases and saves precious resources.

It’s no secret that the digital world, with its new-trend-everyday and that-was-so-last-week mentality, is constantly changing. To keep up with it, you need an equally dynamic strategy that allows you to grow and learn every day.

When planning your digital marketing strategy, you start by analyzing your business plan in depth. You will also compare your plan with that of others in your niche and, more importantly, your own past plans. This will help you pick up tips from others and avoid the mistakes you made in the past. A strategy optimized with such careful deliberation will ultimately lead to you using lesser resources more efficiently.

Knowing your market share is especially important when you’re looking to go digital. Right from the customer profile and behavior to the competitors, propositions and marketing communication options, the online market is very different from the traditional one you’re used to. Not going in with a strategized digital marketing plan will leave you blindsided and lead you to under (or over) estimate the market. This will prove to be a big dent in, both, your budget and your resources.