Sometimes you just don’t know what you don’t know. When it comes to running a business and carrying out a digital marketing strategy, a lot of business owners fall into the category of ‘knowing enough to execute a strategy but not knowing enough to execute it successfully’.
Is it possible you’re sabotaging your digital marketing and putting your business in jeopardy without even realising it? Here are some of the warning signs:
There’s Just No Cohesion
Over the years we’ve encountered clients who, previous to partnering with Ronin, had one big messy hodgepodge of marketing activities. Often, we’ll hear business owners refer to the Google Ads management agency they use for their Google search ads, and a freelance graphic designer they get in every now and again and “John in the office who posts on social media when he gets the chance”. Is this sounding familiar? If it is, then you need to stop what you’re doing immediately because you’re likely doing more damage to your business than good.
Why?
Having various agencies, freelancers or internal staff-members doing your digital marketing leads to a complete lack of cohesion. Your end result will likely be landing pages that don’t connect properly with your website or socials, and your social media marketing will become haphazard with inconsistent brand messaging because people are trying to squeeze it in between their other duties. Meanwhile, your content can turn out to be either dull & uninteresting because it’s written solely for SEO purposes, or approached with blinkers on as to it’s role in the broader customer engagement / marketing picture. When it comes to digital marketing, everything you do should be interconnected and come together in the form of a big picture strategy. In order to truly amplify the voice of your business you need to take a holistic, professional approach.
You’re Focused on the Wrong Metrics
Are you expecting each marketing channel to drive leads leads leads and only judge its effectiveness based on this?
“Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree it will spend its whole life believing it’s stupid.”
-Albert Einstein
This quote by Einstein is the perfect example of why you should never just take a leads-based approach to your marketing. In order to build a solid marketing funnel, each channel must play a different, purpose-appropriate role. No matter the channel, some actions should be purely for engagement, others should grow your database, some will feed into your advertising and some should be driving quality leads. Again, it’s crucial to focus on the bigger picture.
Far too often we see people stop a marketing action because they couldn’t see a clear or immediate return on investment. Usually this is because they didn’t understand the role of this action in the first place which can lead to your entire marketing system breaking down. This is another reason why cohesion is so crucial; if each of the cogs in your marketing system are being controlled by different people or agencies, your strategy simply can’t work effectively or perhaps won’t work at all.
As an example, we had a client who asked us to stop posting on Facebook because they felt that it wasn’t selling enough. There’s two problems with this mindset. The first is that primarily, Facebook isn’t designed to simply sell, it’s designed for engagement and this was the role it was playing in this particular strategic approach. The second is that when we unpacked the metrics of the sales funnel, you could see that Facebook was in actual fact driving really solid sales. Our client just couldn’t see the connection at first glance.
You’re Not Talking to Anyone, You’re Just Selling “At” The Internet
Good marketing is all about connecting with people. Are you aware of your target audience and have you thought about the specific kind of people you want to attract? Where are these people located and how can you forge a genuine connection with them? You do this by creating content, building a social media presence and crafting ad campaigns that are designed with a human touch instead of coming across as spam.
The best way to make sure you stand out from the crowd is to make your business relatable and make it clear that you really do care about the needs of your audience and customers.
Getting Stuck on What You Think Your Competitors Are Doing
Do you really know what your competitors are doing? Just because you might be aware of some of their more visible marketing channels or actions, you have no idea how much or how little is going on behind the scenes. Don’t fall into the trap of trying to replicate what your competitors are doing. You can’t go head to head with a business that has a decade of domain authority and brand awareness by replicating their approach. If you only ever try to emulate what they’ve done, you’ll always be behind. Get creative and adapt a different strategy that will help you to make your own, individual mark.
At Ronin, our clients trust us because they know the execution of their digital marketing strategy is being left in the hands of a team of experts in a range of fields, who constantly work together in order to guarantee each and every client successful results. If you have questions or would like to enquire about partnering with Ronin, get in touch with one of our friendly team members today!
