Digital marketing is not a magic solution. On the contrary, digital marketing services here in the Philippines are frequently fraught with difficulties and problems.
63% of marketers struggle to generate traffic and leads, 60% struggle with content creation, and only 3% of adults trust social media!
However, this is only the tip of the internet marketing iceberg. In pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, content marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), social media marketing, and other forms of digital marketing, the most fundamental problems that digital marketers face are often overlooked.
To avoid making these digital marketing errors, it is helpful to examine each one in detail.
# 1 Misaligned Client-Agency Expectations
Misplaced expectations are one of the most common issues in digital marketing.
Marketers are enchanted by the promises of digital marketing “gurus” who say that Facebook ads (or other miraculous digital marketing strategies) can double or triple a company’s sales. Hence, they expect their digital marketing efforts to bring in a lot of money immediately.
They believe paying a small fee to a low-cost agency and performing a few quick “hacks” will bring them instant fame and fortune.
Another common blunder is hiring an agency to duplicate what others do—sometimes even word-for-word and image-for-image—and expecting the same results.
Solution: Collaborate with Reliable Partners
Choose the right agency to work with to get your digital marketing efforts off to a good start. First, examine their previous experience and track records. Next, obtain their credentials. Third, determine if they know about the available digital marketing channels and how to use them. Finally, make a detailed digital marketing brief before you start to ensure that both the client and the agency have the same goals.
# 2 Attitude Towards Traditional Marketing
Many marketers apply traditional marketing communications thinking to the digital world.
They believe digital marketing campaigns must include “big ideas” with hero creatives applied consistently across multiple channels. They are drawn to the cleverness of their copy and the beauty of their photos or videos. They start with a TV or newspaper ad and then try to cram the creative and copy from that ad into a small digital banner.
The issue with this way of thinking is that the attributes of digital marketing channels become an afterthought. When you try to make an Instagram, Google Display Ads, or email ad look like one in a newspaper or magazine, people often ignore it because they have “banner blindness.”
Solution: Prioritize digital channels.
Consider your digital channels first to avoid these issues. Make your campaign ideas and stories appealing to your target audience. Make it clear what they’ll get (attention spans on digital channels are much shorter than those on offline channels), and make it simple to understand your value proposition at a glance.
#3 Focusing on the Present
Creating a digital brand is a long-term project. You can only turn on and off the faucet whenever you need more customers or sales. Unfortunately, many brands have squandered opportunities to build online relationships due to short-term (or immediate-term) thinking. They are so focused on going viral or making a lot of sales that they forget how important it is to build and maintain relationships with customers.
Solution: Build Your Community
Consider the long-term benefits of building your online brand community to rectify this. Don’t think of a campaign as “once and done,” Instead, use every opportunity to move prospects and customers through the funnel. This means putting in place strategies for customer loyalty that focus on taking care of your customers before and after the sale.
#4 Focus on Immediate Sales
Impatience is a digital marketer’s worst enemy. Particularly when it is tied to aggressive sales figures. Look, there’s nothing wrong with selling. But digital marketers who cannot sell products will soon go out of business—or find another job.
Before a potential customer clicks the “Buy Now” button, digital marketing requires multiple points of contact—as many as 8 to 10 touch-points over a 4 to 6-month period.
Solutions: Lead nurturing and retargeting/remarketing
As any savvy digital marketer will tell you, the conversion process is frequently lengthy online. A prospect may typically do any of the following:
- Conduct a Google search for solutions to his problem.
- Poll your Facebook friends for recommendations.
- Examine online reviews of various products and services.
- View product review videos on YouTube.
- Visit the websites of a few brands to see what they offer.
In the midst of all of this activity, the brand that succeeds will most likely be the one that can make an impression across all of these channels. This should include setting up a brand presence on these channels and using remarketing or retargeting advertising to bring your brand back into people’s minds.
#5 Failure to Track Return on Investment (ROI)
Another frequent complaint is the need for tracking digital marketing ROI. As a result, CFOs often need to learn how to answer when marketers ask how much money their digital marketing efforts bring in. This is frequently due to a combination of factors, including:
- Lack of a systematic budgeting and calculating process for their digital marketing results
- Need to gain adequate knowledge of digital marketing analytics.
- Failure to create a digital marketing funnel
- Excessive emphasis on vanity metrics such as views, likes, comments, and shares
- Adopting the incorrect digital marketing strategies
- Matching Goals, KPIs, Channels, and Content Types
Consider your campaign goals and how they can be tracked across the entire funnel to understand better your digital marketing ROI (social or otherwise). Create intermediate KPIs such as the following:
Solution: Awareness (Front of the Funnel): Impressions, Reach, Video Views, CPM, CPR, and so on.
#6 Insufficient Marketing Investment
In the bootstrapped world of digital entrepreneurship, scrimping and saving are virtues. Spending too little, on the other hand, may help your digital marketing efforts. As more businesses go online, more organic traffic will be required. It will need to be paired with ads like Google Ads, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and native sponsored posts.
These will help you make your efforts go further and get enough traffic through the different steps of your marketing funnel to make a profit.
Solution: Spend the money!
OK, it doesn’t mean you have to spend much on Facebook and Google ads. Instead, consider putting some extra sales into digital marketing, like creating content, making landing pages, and buying ads.
An excellent way to reduce risks in this area is to shift a portion of your marketing budget from non-digital to digital channels. This will give you a good idea of whether it works (or not) and how much your ROI will be if you invest more money in digital channels.
Takeaway!
As digital marketers, we understand every marketer’s difficulties, from day-to-day difficulties to more considerable obstacles such as campaign implementation. These are just a few strategies we employ to overcome obstacles and continue delivering tangible results for our client partners. Get in touch with our team of experts today if you’re looking for ways to solve your digital marketing problems and deliver outstanding results.
