That depends. While digital marketing is the ideal medium for small business owners to advertise their products and services at a fraction of the budget usually demanded by traditional advertising, it is not necessarily something that provide instantaneous results. It’s not perfect, as I had covered previously. It is more measurable than traditional marketing, as it has multiple metrics.
For example, Google Analytics and many other tracking tools use a last click attribution model. In other words, if someone comes to your site from a couple different places, Google Analytics will by default show where they came from. The problem is that the last place they came from is often a search where the user put in your company name. That is not helpful – you want to know what happened before that search.
A related problem is that a lot of tracking is centered on the wrong metrics. People get all caught up in things that are at the top of the funnel. They focus on CTR (click through rates), CPC (cost per click) or CPM (cost per mile). You want to focus on ROI (return on investment). Set up reporting that shows how much you spent for each ad campaign compared to what you earned. Once you see what is working and what is not, you are in a good position to do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.
- Not tracking analytics on digital assets – video views, web traffic, social media engagement etc
- Low marketing budget to come to a conclusion. A $30 ad campaign on Facebook will give so little data that it cannot be used as a good indication of audience segmentation or targeting.
- Black hat techniques. Believe it or not, people are still buying likes and backlinks today!
- Expecting performance based on digital marketing experience from ten years ago, when the market was totally different. Today, online ads are no longer ‘cheap’ and organic reach is a lot harder to achieve. Comparing today’s results to what was done a decade ago is not realistic.
In a nutshell, a successful digital marketing strategy will have clearly defined goals and will understand how to produce content to maximize effectiveness.
