Digital marketing has become the marketing focal point for small businesses.
But many businesses sabotage themselves trying to attain digital marketing ROI. You must avoid the most common mistakes to drive revenue for your business.
You may have the most modern digital marketing strategy in your niche.
But the biggest investments don't always pay off. You need more than the best 'marketing mix' to produce measurable, consistent results.
Your marketing strategy needs to focus on driving business value. But most businesses don't know how to measure their digital marketing ROI.
These businesses can't see their problem areas and continue to fail.
You can get the most from your investment and maintain a positive sales trajectory. You can study your results and improve marketing practices as well.
You must prevent the most common missteps before you can turn marketing into a profit driver.
Digital Marketing ROI for Losers
You're making big investments in your digital marketing team and technologies. If you're preparing to make marketing a revenue driver, you're not alone. 70% of marketers believe marketing is the primary driver of revenue.
Before we talk about how your business can succeed, let's talk about how it can fail.
First, know that the digital marketing space is all-out war. You're fighting for search rankings and fleeting attention within your target audience.
You may have a winning digital marketing strategy. You may have the right team and technologies as well. But they need to fail and learn from those failures before that revenue dream comes true.
Most marketing teams don't know how to link testing and performance to business results.
"New metrics and measurement techniques, facilitated by pervasive technology, are abundant," says SiriusDecisions. "Despite this, few CMOs can link activity to real business impact."
Your marketing teams will fail. Your responsibility is ensuring they learn from those failures. Do this and you'll be successful where your competitors fall short.
The 5 Major Failures of Digital Marketing
Digital marketing is cyclical. Many companies fail to bounce back from early missteps. Other companies can't detect if they're failing at all.
These five big marketing mistakes prevent teams from improving techniques and performance. Avoid these traps and take our suggestions to move your business forward.
1. Failure to Prepare Teams for the Digital Marketing Cycle
Your team may be confident in their digital marketing strategy. They may have identified the best channels to engage your target market as well. But when they begin, how will they know when they've succeeded?
Most companies don't prepare their teams for how much they'll need to adapt their techniques as they go. Many companies don't have tools in place to help them. If your content isn't performing and nobody knows it, you're losing out on your investment.
Your content should evolve as your marketing campaigns continue. You should be adjusting how you approach different channels as well. It may seem economical to use the same content across channels, but you're losing money if it isn't working.
Be sure to challenge your digital marketers to develop winning content. You must trust them and approve new content quickly. Timeliness speeds up progress and more opportunities to improve.
But you can't improve digital marketing if you don't know how well it performs. The majority of marketers can't align their campaigns with real business results. But we'll discuss methods to get ahead of the competition.
2. Failure to Use Testing, Measurement, and Analytics Correctly
You can't avoid failure if you don't know it's happening.
You must measure the success of all your digital marketing initiatives. Do it in real time to get the best performance insights.
Many digital marketing channels have built-in metrics. These include Google and Facebook Ads. They provide in-depth pictures into your performance.
You can improve channel-specific content based on these results. But they don't provide a greater picture of your market impact. And many of the metrics you need are less straightforward than you think.
For example, you should check campaign performance across all channels for a holistic view. You must understand your brand impact across social channels in this case. Use the right tools to measure visibility, audience, and engagement in these areas.
3. Failure to Use Inbound Marketing Effectively
Most companies can't align digital marketing with the inbound process. This is especially damaging to digital marketing ROI. Marketers can't improve methods if they don't have visibility into the engagement process.
You need solutions that track performance from campaign launch to sale. This will help you identify where your leads fell off. You can adjust your messaging and target for better alignment with sales.
Marketing and sales have different disciplines. But the messaging you send out to the market must carry over to the sales team. Your leads shouldn't have expectations on which sales can't deliver.
4. Failure to Nurture Leads During the Customer Journey
Many companies fail to use the inbound methodology with success. That's because they don't understand how content affects the customer journey. They then don't understand why incoming traffic doesn't translate into sales.
Your marketing team should be offering value-added content to your audience. This will attract prospects to the sales funnel.
But most marketers fail at this point. They don't know how to properly nurture needs. They aren't able to transition qualified leads to sales.
Inbound marketing should be a component of your greater marketing strategy. There are a lot of components you'll need to improve as you go. Measuring performance throughout the inbound process helps you improve your entire digital strategy.
5. Failure to Delight and Turn Customers into Advocates
Personalization is another oversight among many marketing teams. This applies to both inbound prospects and nurturing existing customers. Your marketing team must also turn existing customers into advocates.
Once you've converted leads into customers, you should know a lot about them. You should continue to delight them as they do business with you. You should personalize messages for them if they have not engaged with you for a while.
You can also leverage existing customer data to improve your inbound digital strategy. But you need the data on what brought you their business in the first place. You need the data surrounding their conversion as well.
Then, find better targets in your audience and continue refining your strategy. Digital marketing ROI comes from patience and diligence. Your efforts become less strenuous as your strategy and business improve.
The Best Tools for Digital Marketing ROI
Your marketing team needs a lot of resources. Get the marketing, lead generation, and design tools they need from a single partner.
HookLead focuses on business value, helping you get quality leads that turn into sales. Contact us now for a free consultation on boosting your digital marketing ROI.