Beware These Deadly Digital Marketing Ghouls & Goblins

For many organizations, their marketing and advertising budgets are increasingly being allocated to digital. Whether it's for content marketing or paid digital advertising, budgets are shifting away from traditional channels.

eMarketer, a leading research firm, has predicted that US Digital Ad Spending Will Surpass Traditional in 2019. By all accounts we are well on our way to this happening.

At ImageX, we're increasingly seeing this trend with our clients — more and more resources, and attention, are being given to digital. 

To make the most of your digital efforts, and to avoid derailing your brand we’re sharing these ghoulish digital marketing mistakes — and how you can avoid them.

1. Understand your audience's needs

Firstly, failure to really understand what your customers want will ultimately disable any effectiveness of your digital efforts. This is true in the broader sense of your overall digital strategy.

The most well-thought out campaign, the craftiest wordsmithing, and the most striking visuals will fall flat if it doesn’t resonate with the target audience.

Avoid this goblin

Every part of your campaign counts, but you must start with understanding the target audience. 

This process can, and should, involve user research and testing. You’ll want to understand what motivates them, what pains them, and what turns them off. 

The language of the copy, the visual styles you apply, and even the method you choose to reach them will be guided by this understanding. Dedicate the time to uncover meaningful insights from target audience analysis.

2. If you don’t set them, you don’t reach them

It's obvious, yet we commonly see many brands starting out with the idea of “just dipping their toes in”, without so much as even clearly defining a goal behind it. 

Before you start putting resources, and money into your digital strategy you need to set goals. 

Setting up the requisite social media accounts and using a few hashtags doesn’t provide much benefit if there isn’t a goal behind it. This compounds quickly when you utilize budget and actually start paying for clicks. 

Measurable goals are essential to making informed, data-backed decisions — it drives future strategy.

Avoiding this goblin

Even if you just have a basic goal, such as driving traffic to your website — start with that. At the very least you can measure the effectiveness of how well your efforts are doing.

A technology client of ours recently launched a new product. They opted to use display advertising on Google Ads and LinkedIn to drive traffic to their conversion page.  Their primary goal was to “get eyeballs” on their new SAAS offering. A secondary goal was lead generation — if visitors completed their sign-up form, great, but the primary goal was site visits! Both were easy goals to measure.

To measure these goals, we tracked how many New Users and Sessions came from each source of traffic. We also tracked other user engagement metrics including Bounce Rate and Average Session Duration, etc. 

This allowed us to make key decisions about where to allocate the budget — Google Ads, or LinkedIn. 

The next step was when the client started to vet the quality of the leads. With this small amount of data we could make decisions about how to further develop their campaigns.

3. Giving up the ghost 

A very common mistake, and one that doesn’t serve digital marketing efforts at all, is not giving it enough time. Just because digital technology evolves at lightning speed, doesn’t mean that digital marketing will deliver results in the same way. 

Don’t get spooked if your efforts don’t seem to be delivering you results as fast, or as immediately as you might expect.  Your target audience is human after all, and they will take time to truly engage with your brand. Depending on the method of digital marketing, for example, if you’re using paid banner advertising, it may even take longer to see results because your audience may not even see your advertising, or content when you first begin.

Avoiding this goblin

Performance is hard to predict. There are some industry benchmark reports available, but this kind of research can only help give a sense of what can be accomplished — it’s still a bit of guessing game in the beginning. 

If you’re just starting out, then start with the following steps: 

• define the purpose of the activity — is it to raise brand awareness? 

• decide on the goal — is it capture lead information, or to acquire new visitors?

• set a budget — commit to how much you’re going to spend and stick to it.

It may take multiple touchpoints before a prospect engages with your content or adverts. Consistency is the key, don’t give up too soon!

In Conclusion

Getting started with digital marketing can be scary, and might even feel overwhelming. Start by understanding your audience. Decide what the purpose of your efforts are and give it time to actually play out before you make any decisions about if works or not.

Contact our team if you'd like more information about our digital marketing services, or just to talk through your project goals!