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Times have changed, and so has the way businesses approach their customers. They say if you want to see improvements in your business or increase sales, you must engage in digital marketing.
Traditional marketing has taken a step back, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. In terms of opportunities and growth, digital marketing can be highly beneficial to businesses.
“Fail fast” is fine in theory but I’d hate you to waste the same time and money I did when starting our digital marketing. Here are five mistakes we made, and that you can avoid, save time and money, and drive growth faster.
Acting on “fuct” rather than fact
The single best thing you can do to keep yourself honest is to build a simple fact base: what you did, and what the result was. Building this, over time, is the perfect antidote to the “feelings” and false assumptions (“fucts”) we and our clients sometimes use as a basis for our marketing, but that stop us from learning fast.
Tracking vanity metrics
The amount of media articles you generate is a vanity metric, not a business one. Instead, we recommend, and we use, metrics like indexable words published per month, number of emails sent, readership metrics and database growth. We track these because they drive database growth and leads which in turn drive revenue. That’s the ultimate metric!
Creating too much content and not campaigning it enough
We put waaaay too much of our overall thought leadership and marketing effort into the content creation process and too little into campaigning it. We’re in the financial services so it’s tempting to think you need constant new and clever content. Not true. About 80/20 to “campaign” versus “create” is probably right for most financial and professional services businesses under about $100m revenue.
Talking to ourselves not our target audiences
Behavioural economics has plenty to say about how irrational most of us are as decision-making machines. This includes being terrible at predicting how others think. We’ve spent countless hours and too much money persisting with messages and channels (Twitter) we thought would be effective, and we found interesting. Our content wasn’t resonating with our audiences. We killed off the lower performance content, focussed on engaging a narrow group of target clients, and cut down the topic list. Life got easier.
Going soft when we should have gone hard
It’s easy to wimp out at the tough choices but then your lack of courage will mean your digital marketing will be kind of… limp. We did this. When we scaled up our digital marketing we weren’t brave enough to eliminate a whole bunch of brands, like big banks, from our target market. Some clients just aren’t in our (or your) sweet spot in terms of relationship, results we can deliver, or the type of work we enjoy doing. It took me about 10 years too long to work this out.
When we did, we did less digital marketing and it delivered more leads.
Read the full story: Let's Talk: 11 expert tips to nail your digital marketing efforts in 2022 – Dynamic Business.
If you’d like to discuss your strategic communication call us or contact us here.
