As CEO and Digital Marketing Consultant at award-winning Digital Marketing Agency InSynch, I have spoken to literally 1000’s of business owners and managers. I have observed their digital marketing strategies and witnessed first-hand the flawed approaches they have taken and seen money being wasted over and over again.
I have seen digital marketing agencies implement digital marketing strategies for businesses that are quite simply destined to fail due to the over-simplistic approach that is geared towards making money for the digital marketing agency and not for the business.
I thought it would be useful for business owners to outline some of the main digital marketing strategy mistakes I see so that they can be avoided.
Marketing Strategy Mistake 1 – Digital Marketing focusing mainly on PPC (Google Ads)
There are digital marketing agencies in the UK that almost exclusively focus on selling businesses paid advertising campaigns. They believe that the best marketing approach for companies is to set a budget for paid adverts and manage those campaigns for you. You pay them a monthly fee for the ads and management and that’s it.
There is a chance this could work of course. A chance. The PPC management company will report to you on cost per click, number of impressions, etc, and even suggest you increase your spending in order to get more clicks.
What they rarely discuss in any detail is ROI (return on investment) or ROAS (Return on Ad Spend). Ultimately as a business, this is the critical information you need.
Fact: Paid advertising campaigns do not always bring a positive return on investment. There is nothing wrong with a paid ads campaign not working. What is wrong is not knowing it isn’t working so you can stop it!
Even if the campaign is working, what about all the visitors that bounce straight off again? What strategy is in place to capture their email address, and tag them with a pixel for remarketing? Which products or pages are performing badly? Which keywords and advert variations bring the best returns? What happens if we reduce or increase the budget?
Paid advertising campaigns should be part of a much larger digital marketing strategy and sometimes, they shouldn’t be run at all!
Marketing Strategy Mistake 2 – Running Social media campaigns that look good and deliver nothing
Digital Marketing is not just about social media. Social media campaigns have a role to play of course and almost all of our monthly digital marketing clients have some form of social media activity. However, social media is not the final step in a customer journey. Social media plays a role in that customer journey but it is not the end game.
When giving digital marketing consultancy to businesses, I have lost count of the number of times that business owners have wanted to discuss getting more followers, how often they should be posting, and how to get more engagement on social media. Many businesses post blindly on social media because they think they should without any thought for the results. They get excited because 20 people liked their Instagram post. They are trying to figure out how to get on TikTok because their friend’s daughter says it is amazing and they simply have to be on there!
Followers = vanity and not business generated
Number of social media posts/platforms used = time/money spend and does not equal business generated
New businesses or existing businesses looking for more customers will often focus on getting more social media accounts and posting more often. In isolation this is very unlikely to work.
Consider the following:
People don’t go on social media to buy your products or services. They are on social media for social interaction, and to watch funny videos. They are looking at how many comments they have had or how many likes on their latest photo.
If people on social media do end up stumbling upon your products and services, and they even make their way over to your website, they are some of the worst website visitors you can get. Visitors from social media to websites are some of the least likely visitors to buy your product or service. Conversely, email marketing can be up to 40 times more effective than social media at converting a customer.
When we undertake social media campaigns with our digital marketing clients, our aims are usually quite simply brand awareness and driving email subscriptions through lead adverts and incentivised sign-ups.
If the majority of your time or that of your Digital marketing company is spent on social media, you may wish to step back and see what other online marketing strategies you are missing out on.
Marketing Strategy Mistake 3 – Doing a bit of everything and failing to measure, then refining the approach.
There are 100s of different activities that you or your digital marketing agency could be doing in or to market your business online. Sometimes, you might get the perfect mix of digital marketing campaign elements and deliver an effective campaign from the outset that cannot be improved.
Running a perfect campaign from the outset that cannot be improved is extremely rare. Even the most successful campaigns can be tweaked in order to get more return on investment from digital marketing.
Perhaps you or your agency are undertaking PPC, SEO, email marketing, social media posts, social media advertising, landing pages, conversion rate optimisation, offline marketing, influencer marketing, etc. If you have unlimited time and an unlimited budget then that is not a problem. However, most people do not have unlimited time and most businesses want to be more efficient and get more for their money.
Measure, measure, measure
I was asked as a speaker at a large business conference in Edinburgh recently what would be my number one digital marketing tip for the delegates. Measure, measure, measure was my immediate reply! Almost every digital marketing activity is measurable. Therefore every digital marketing strategy can be assessed for its return on investment (ROI).
- You can measure the performance of individual social media posts. Not just reach and impressions but how much business they generated.
- You can measure which email subject line led to the most sales/enquiries
- You can measure which page on your website is turning people off
- You can measure whether men/women of different age brackets will respond to your adverts
- You can measure whether people are scanning your QR codes and which ones work best
- You can measure the impact of a campaign in terms of downloads, web chats, and pages viewed, in addition to sales/enquiries
- You can measure the success of dozens of campaigns and then increase and decrease your spending accordingly
- You can discover which times of the year people are more predisposed to be looking for your product and service and then increase your activity accordingly.
I could go on….
Put simply, if you are undertaking lots of digital marketing activities and are not measuring their success at a granular level, then you are wasting time and resources.
Measuring everything is core to every digital marketing campaign we run at InSynch. Responding and adapting to the measured results is where success is found. Sadly, I see that many businesses and marketing agencies miss out on this step entirely….
Total Digital Marketing
Our Total Digital Marketing packages were borne out of the experiences described above. We realised that so many businesses approached digital marketing without a clear strategy or in a simplistic way, only realising a year or two down the line that it hadn’t worked. Our Total Digital Marketing strategic approach is used with all of our monthly clients and we teach it in webinars to businesses across the UK.
Book on our next free digital marketing webinar or book a free 121 to get impartial feedback on your business’s digital marketing activities.