Running a successful digital marketing campaign is no easy task, especially if you don’t have a dedicated team of experienced marketers, designers, and consultants in-house that can design, execute, and optimize a holistic marketing strategy. Despite lacking the proper resources to run a successful marketing program, many organizations choose to keep marketing in-house, believing it’s the cheaper option.
In this blog, let’s touch upon the main mistakes we’ve seen organizations make when it comes to marketing strategy, and why digital marketing outsourcing may be the right move for your business.
Taking An Undifferentiated Approach
Since budget is often top of mind for small to midsize organizations, many make the mistake of sticking to a single demand generation channel. The logic makes sense. Instead of diluting spend across three channels, pick a favorite and scale. This can work if you’ve identified a highly productive channel, such as Google Search, that provides reliable, financially productive results on a quarter-over-quarter basis.
But putting all of your eggs in one basket is an incredibly risky move, and it also means you’re missing out on communication channels that your prospects and competitors are taking advantage of. If you don’t test out several channels, you’ll never know which ones perform best for your business. Furthermore, running a differentiated digital marketing strategy is critical as a hedge against risk. Let’s say you’re only running paid search on Google, and you see a sudden downturn in performance driven by an increase in competition and higher costs per click. Well, your firm’s entire lead generation strategy might be at risk, and you’re left scrambling to launch new tests. If you embrace a differentiated approach from the beginning, and allocate a testing budget every month, you’re insulated from the risk and much more agile when shifts happen in the marketplace.
Failing To Test
Testing is a key component of any successful digital marketing initiative, but many firms neglect to properly conduct tests. If you launch ads on LinkedIn, for example, and you only launch a single ad variation that is ultimately unsuccessful, that does not mean the entire channel is not productive. You should be launching several ad and copy variations to make sure you’re getting a wide range of messages out there, and can determine which ones resonate best with your audience.
The same goes for other channels like Google. You must constantly be iterating in order to improve performance, because the digital marketing world champions a culture of testing. Your competitors are constantly tweaking their messaging to make it more engaging, iterating upon their keyword strategy to bring in a more qualified audience, and optimizing their landing pages to increase conversion rates.
A great digital marketing agency will have a nuanced understanding of both A/B and multivariate testing, and understand when to use each to. In an A/B test, the marketer only changes one aspect of a page or campaign, like the color of a button to see how that impacts performance. Multivariate testing entails altering multiple variations at once, like button size and button color simultaneously. A savvy digital marketer knows when to use these testing methods, and how to draw insights from them.
Looking At The Wrong Metrics
Digital marketing is a money-in, money-out operation. If you’re looking at vanity metrics like impressions and click-throughs without paying attention to the conversion rates, you’re not looking at the right things.
Seasoned digital marketers know which metrics to look at in order to diagnose issues or bottlenecks in the sales funnel. Is your click-through rate low? Take a look at your messaging. Is your conversion rate low? It’s time to optimize your landing pages. Is your pipeline over ad spend number below benchmark? Time to do a deep dive into lead quality and evaluate your sales process.
Despite the fact that digital marketing is a highly analytical and data-driven area of practice, few organizations approach it as such. They’ll review metrics on a monthly basis, and focus on brand awareness metrics instead of focusing on return on investment. Most organizations have a poor understanding of what return on investment should even look like for a digital marketing campaign.
Before you launch a campaign, you should know what cost you can afford to pay per lead, and account for projected conversion metrics down the funnel, so you can base your top-of-the-funnel goals on the financial constraints of your product or service.
Even if lead generation isn’t the goal of your campaign, it behooves you to have a framework to measure the success of your campaign. For instance, for an organic social campaign, set a goal to increase your follower amount by a certain percentage, or aim to increase organic traffic to your site. It’s far easier to judge the success of your digital marketing efforts when you have a baseline goal to use as a reference point.
Why Outsourcing May Be Right For You
When trusting your digital marketing outsourcing with FullFunnel, you get access to a team of marketers, designers, and web developers, all for the price of one. Digital marketing agencies know how to set up best-in-class, comprehensive campaigns and conduct tests to ensure you’re getting the most out of every dollar of spend. Additionally, agencies possess a high breadth of channel knowledge, guaranteeing you a varied marketing strategy that meets potential customers in several places across the internet. If your firm lacks the resources to conduct effective digital marketing initiatives in-house, you’re a great fit for outsourcing.
* * *
If your firm is struggling with its demand generation efforts, has it considered digital marketing outsourcing? At FullFunnel, we’ve worked with dozens of firms of all sizes and from all industries to create successful digital marketing strategies. Request a free consultation to learn more about how we can help you get a return on your marketing investment and grow your business.
