Things are ass-backwards these days when it comes to digital marketing.
Every client wants to talk about tactics. They want to know why the marketing activities they’re doing don’t seem to be working as well as they’d expected.
Will you take a look at my website and do an audit?
Will you review my website rankings and see what’s wrong?
Why aren’t we getting more leads from social media?
People assume that if their marketing isn’t working, then it must because of HOW they’re executing a particular tactic. And if they could just figure out how to understand the numbers and fix the technical errors, things will turn around.
Our website isn’t designed as effectively or has technical errors.
We must be bidding on the wrong keywords.
I guess we’re not doing social media the right way.
If you’re taking this approach when trying to figure out what isn’t working, you’re missing the boat!
Nerd Alert
Digital marketing holds the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The one thing every business owner dreams of… the straight line between measuring activity and results.
If you get a click to your website, you can measure where it came from and what the person did while on your site. You can even track if they bought, applied or called you.
It’s a drug.
Radio doesn’t offer it. TV? No way. Digital is the only place you can get that straight line.
The problem is that when things don’t work, people go looking in all the wrong places for the fix.
I must need more keywords.
Let’s redo this landing page.
Let’s post more often to social media.
They assume something is wrong with the vehicle. With the tactics.
The nerds have won.
A Better Way
It’s been my experience that when marketing isn’t working, it’s less often about problems with the tactics.
The problem usually lies with the message.
Or to put it another way, it’s not that you’re DOING the wrong things. It’s that you’re SAYING the wrong things.
I’ve seen plenty of marketing campaigns produce incredible results with crappy websites, marginal landing pages, badly designed emails and almost any other tactical flaw you can imagine.
Now, does refining the tactics help? Of course it does. But ONLY if you’ve got the right message.
The art of marketing, the thing radio and TV people have always known and what this generation of digital-savvy marketers is losing, lies in knowing how to craft a compelling message and deliver that message to a sufficient number of people.
Message. Frequency. Reach.
You can argue over how to best accomplish frequency and reach.
But if your marketing isn’t producing the results you’re looking for, start with the message.
