There Is A Simple Key To Digital Marketing Success And If You’re Not Careful You Will Miss It
More and more business owners and new marketing firms are attempting to run complex digital marketing campaigns on their own. In theory, there is nothing stopping them from doing so. Afterall, access to marketing and advertising technology is more open than it ever has been. But how successful are these campaigns likely to be?
Access to Advertising: The Game Has Changed
Access to advertising options is more open than ever. It used to be you needed a relationship with a human being at a media company to get the best advertising possible for your business. With the dawn of digital marketing with the likes of Google, YouTube and Facebook all of that has changed.
Anyone with a credit card can open up a digital advertising account with most of the digital ad platforms. There they will have much of the same access to powerful digital advertising tools that professional advertising agencies on 5th Avenue in New York have.
But even though everyone can get access now, does that mean everyone will be successful? Obviously, the answer is a resounding no. Let’s explore why.
The Pitfalls in Digital Marketing Campaigns
Digital marketing can be complex. Advertising is no longer as simple as calling up your media buying representative and buying radio or television time and then getting a report of estimated number of impressions (views). No, digital marketing is far more complex. It involves a variety of different channels and platforms all attempting to integrate with one another to produce a revenue driving outcome for businesses. Digital marketers have way more decisions to make and way more variables to manage in order to make an advertising campaign a success. Unfortunately, there are many pitfalls that stand in the way of actually reaching true digital marketing success. We have identified the four biggest pitfalls facing digital marketing professionals.
PITFALL #1: THINKING A GREAT IDEA IS GOOD ENOUGH
One of the strengths of great marketers is great ideas. Great marketers are creative. But is a great idea alone good enough to make a digital marketing campaign succeed? The answer is no. Some of the best marketing ideas fail because they are not executed well. Great ideas have to be backed up by bulletproof strategies that will allow the campaigns to be effective in the real world. Time and again we’ve seen marketers take a great idea and fail to make any real impact with it.
PITFALL #2: DOING STRATEGY AS YOU GO
All too often digital marketers get a great idea and are then off to the races to tell the world about it. They start buying digital ad space. Creating landing pages and emails. And doing a bunch of social media posts for about a month before they get tired. Along the way they make strategy decisions often without even realizing it. In other words, they do minimal strategy as they go only because they are forced to. For example, when they are about to make their Facebook ad campaigns live, they say “Hmm, I wonder who I should actually target with this ad?” These are the types of strategic questions that should have been answered before the campaign even began.
PITFALL #3: BUILDING AS YOU GO
Many marketers and business owners will start a marketing program or campaign and sort of build onto it over time. A landing page here. A month later a couple more landing pages there. Some customer email lists here. A few email sends there. Running a huge advertising promotion and halfway through realizing you need a better and faster website. Better build it this weekend! Your marketing infrastructure for a campaign should be built out and polished BEFORE the campaign ever goes live.
PITFALL #4: NOT SETTING UP TRACKING BEFORE YOU START
You will have no idea if your digital marketing campaign really succeeded if you don’t track it. We have seen so many business owners come to us with failed campaigns they or other marketing firms attempted, and they do not have the data to understand why it failed. Setting up tracking may seem boring, but you will be glad you have the data from it once you have spent thousands of dollars on a digital marketing program.
The Key to a Successful Digital Marketing Campaign
The key to a successful digital marketing campaign is seeing the end before you begin. If you want to be able to get somewhere you have to know where it is that you are going. A great idea is a great idea…but what is your goal for it? In the end, when it’s all said and done, what do you hope to have achieved?
Seeing the end before you begin means knowing what your goals are before you start. But it also means making a plan to get there before you begin the campaign. You need to write a clear and detailed marketing strategy before you start your campaign. This strategy should address all of the key factors that will determine whether or not your campaign will succeed or fail. Who are your audiences? Where are your audiences online? How will you reach them? How much will that cost? What will you need to create and build to run the campaign? How will you incentivize your audiences to complete your goals? Is your Google My Business page optimized? These are the types of strategic questions you must answer if you want to truly see the end before you begin.
In addition to knowing what your goals are and having a strategy and plan to reach them, you also need to build your marketing systems so that they are running like well-oiled machines before you start your campaign. The last thing you want is to spend thousands of dollars buying digital advertising and running that paid traffic to a website that is not working right because it wasn’t built well or is not complete. Another consideration is trends in digital marketing, such as SEO trends. In this way, building is also a key part of being able to see the end before you begin because knowing your goals dictates what you will have to build and have in place in order for your audience to reach the goals of your campaign.
Lastly, there is the issue of tracking. How can you set up the tracking if you don’t know what to track? You need to know what your endgame is. What are your goals and how will you track them? For example, if your goal is sales of certain products you need to make sure you have all digital tracking scripts in place to track and attribute sales data back to the different digital advertising channels and digital ads involved in your campaign. Don’t get caught unprepared when it comes to tracking. Have tracking set up before your campaign starts.
Results Digital: 20/20 Vision, Not Hindsight
Our team here at Results Digital is 100% committed to taking the time and consideration to carefully think about our Conroe clients’ goals and the best strategies to achieve those goals. The first question we ask before every campaign is: What is the end goal? We keep our clients’ end goals for their campaigns constantly at the forefront of our vision as we create strategies, build websites and marketing systems and implement detailed tracking plans. When the time comes to make one of our client’s campaigns live, we know the strategy is airtight and complete, all the building is complete and all of the detailed tracking mechanisms are in place. We are fully committed to 20/20 vision for our clients’ campaigns, not hindsight 20/20.
