Why Your Digital Marketing Is Failing

Investing in your company’s digital marketing leads to increased sales and strong client relationships. Learn why most businesses fail at digital marketing.

Running a company? You have a lot on your plate: Sales, financial management, employee relations and management, product and service development and delivery, supply chain management—and more.

In a lot of companies that have grown organically, marketing doesn’t exist. When it does, it’s done haphazardly, based on gut feel. Digital marketing may not even play a role. And when it does, it gets short shrift. You figure people do business with you because they know you or one of your salespeople—not because they found you on-line.

In many cases, you’re right. Yet you and your sales team can’t touch everyone who could be a key prospect. (Well, unless you’re spending far more on sales than you should be spending.) And more senior executives—with the signing authority to buy your product or service—rely on their computers and mobile devices more than ever to review e-mail, exchange text messages, read articles, and research best practices and new opportunities for addressing their pain points.

Engaging senior executives via digital marketing has grown increasingly more essential to building trust and establishing mindshare—and building relationships—long before your sales team ever reaches them on the phone or via an outreach e-mail.

So if you’re doing any kind of digital marketing, good job. Yet it probably isn’t performing as well as it could. Let’s look at three of the most common reasons why.

Ignorance

You don’t understand the game you’re playing.

If you can at least admit that you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re ahead of the game. Digital marketing is a complex field. Experienced digital marketers understand the multiple elements and technologies involved, how to link them, how to measure them, and how to optimize, nurture, and manage their results.

It’s a common fallacy to assume an intern or junior-level marketing coordinator can manage digital marketing. If you’ve ever said the following to someone on your team, you’ve made this mistake: “Run an ad on Google and let me know how it goes in a few days. If it doesn’t generate results by Friday let’s try something else.”

Something that you treat like a joke will deliver laughable results.

Mixing Marketing with Sales

Have you lumped marketing with sales?

Worse, do you have your marketing team reporting to your sales team?

Hey, we get it. It’s easier to throw something you don’t understand into a pile of things you have a better grasp on. And from where you sit, it’s all about revenue growth, right?

Yet sales and marketing are highly different disciplines. When you lump them together, you lose clarity on what’s happening, why it’s happening, and how the two can best work together. Sales-and-marketing then becomes a big black box. And you have a tendency to blame the thing you least understand—marketing—when sales are lacking.

In reality, many midmarket companies haven’t yet realized the advantages of investing into an in-depth marketing strategy and plan development effort. The result? A lame marketing campaign that’s doomed from the start.

Marketing tells your target audiences—in the manner to which they’re most likely to get the message—the story about your product or service. Marketing nurtures them along so that they’re primed to buy long before they make contact. Smart marketing shortens the sales cycle, lowers the cost of sales, allows you to increase your price point, lowers price pressure and improves margins, and increases the efficiency of your sales team—just to name a few of the biggest benefits.

Invest in smart marketing, team it up with a ferocious sales crew, allow the two to work as peers and not direct-reports, and you’ll be a formidable force in your market.

The Wrong Stuff

A campaign without a game plan leads to sloppy, inefficient, directionless marketing.

This is where companies get into trouble fast. Budgets evaporate without a trace. No one knows where it went or how to know if it worked. Worse? They figure it didn’t work, because they didn’t bother to measure it.

Don’t assume your marketing manager can design a marketing strategy and plan. As with any discipline, marketing has many different facets. All marketing people are not alike, and all skill sets are not equivalent, and all training types and levels are not the same. Print design is not web design. Experiential marketers aren’t digital marketers. And marketing managers are not strategists. Just as an electrical engineer should not do biomedical engineering, a podiatrist should not practice neurosurgery, and an inside sales executive should not be given relationship building business development responsibilities. And so on.

If you ask the wrong person to do the job, you’ll get the wrong results. Sure, it may seem cheaper, but it will cost you more in the long run in wasted resources and lost opportunities.

In Short

You’re failing with your digital marketing because you aren’t taking it seriously enough to understand it, to categorize it appropriately, and to give it the resources it needs to succeed.

Why?

Perhaps because you don’t believe that digital marketing can achieve results. Perhaps because you think it’s easy because it looks easy from the outside. (Hint: It’s not.)

Smart executives will realize the errors of these ways and invest in developing and executing strategic digital marketing strategies.

We won’t lie to you: Doing marketing the right way will cost more than doing it the wrong way. Yet it will make you more and save you in other areas—and isn’t that what matters?

Are you ready for professionally developed and managed marketing? Contact FrogDog today. We’d love to help.

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net