The Role of a Digital Marketing Agency

When done right, digital marketing will create significant growth, but this requires more than just every day tactics. Growing your business requires a firm understanding of current marketing trends and strategies. 

Here are my top eight reasons why marketing strategies fail:

1. Lack of having a marketing strategy: Without the correct strategy in place, you end up with random pieces of content all over the place with no conversion goal in mind. There’s no clarity in what you’re trying to achieve or what call to action you want a person to take. This failure causes your business to become a turn-off versus a turn-on because people will think you don’t have it together.   

2.  Failure to implement: That sounds like such a bad word, but it’s true. Failure to implement, no matter in what area of your business, plays a key role in your marketing efforts. Some examples are not implementing a consistent social media schedule, unwilling to listen to consumers, not creating a lead generation opt-in, not revising landing pages that don’t convert, etc. Your online marketing strategy requires value-based content, engaging videos, captivating emails, and so much more... and when #allthosethings start overwhelming you, you never implement.

3.  Lack of audience clarity: Before you start marketing yourself, you have to know who you’re marketing to. Most importantly... you need to know what their pain points are, VERY well, and be able to speak to them using the exact language they would use themselves, and get them to emotionally invest in the value based content you're putting out there.

4.  Setting unrealistic goals: One of the first questions I ask on a discovery call is “What are your marketing goals?” Many times, I am hit with unrealistic goals, such as I only want to invested $1,000 in my marketing efforts, but I want to make $100K off this launch. While anything is possible, most of the people I speak with have never run an ad in their business, nor invested in any marketing. Another unrealistic goal is believing they know their audience, when in reality, the marketing data shows otherwise. When you set up goals, these goals should provide focused direction on exactly what you want to work toward or achieve. By setting goals, you not only have the ability to create a plan to reach your goals, but also give yourself permission to revisit those goals and change anything to help further the plan.   And you know what...there will be obstacles that will affect the outcome of your goals, but if you focus on the obstacle, you’ll fail and not reach the desired outcome, thus hitting the brickwall. But..If you focus on the goal, the desired outcome, you’ll continue along the path to your success. 

5.  Not providing enough valuable, educational content: Customers today are doing their homework and researching everything prior to purchasing. This gives you the opportunity to build a relationship with each person that interacts with your social media, reads your blog content, watches your videos and/or stories, engages your messenger chat bot, reads your emails, etc. So if you're not creating this value based, educational content, you aren't getting found by potential clients.

6.  Limiting your presence: A digital marketing strategy requires implementation on more than just one platform. Everyone has access to the internet and has their own personal preferences of where they go to find out about services or products. By using a combination of platforms, you have the ability to reach more people which results in bringing them back to your website with retargeting efforts. And it doesn't have to be that time consuming and difficult either. For example, Facebook and Instagram have a direct integration. If you're posting more consistently and engaged more on Instagram, you can connect the two platforms and all IG posts and stories will appear on your Facebook business page, too.

7. Neglecting to measure your return on investment: One thing I always ask my digital marketing is...Do you have Google Analytics set up? Believe it or not, most business owners haven’t done this one simple thing to be able to measure how their marketing efforts are performing across all platforms. How do you know what’s successful when you don’t have data? Data drives success! Data gives us the ability to improve and optimize any marketing strategy. By interpreting the data you have the ability to get laser-focused on where you’re getting the most results, and scale your marketing campaigns accordingly. 

8.  Setting unhealthy expectations: I have a lot of needs and wants within my own business, but without a plan and the proper budget, I have no idea how it will happen. One of the most important questions I ask business owners is what is how much of a product, service, or course they expect to sell from each marketing campaign.  A lot of times, their expectations don’t meet the budget they have set for their marketing efforts. You might expect to have a certain income goal but in reality, it may be out-of-reach at the because you don’t have the marketing budget necessary to achieve that result. By properly setting expectations, it will allow you to make improvements where needed and really niche down your focus on the responding audience so you get the maximum results for your marketing budget.