Common challenges in digital marketing
Are you messing up?
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Are you messing up? 🧐
Why are businesses missing the point?
It’s safe to say that every enterprise, or any business size, has one main goal: to make revenue. And marketing is always that department that’s either praised or underestimated. But what matters (especially in the board room) is the results: sales revenue and associated costs.
Results come from multiple sources, online or offline, so we call this “multi-channel attribution” to map out where and how the sale (or conversion) is coming in.
When we say “let’s optimize our channel attribution strategy”, we’re really just saying “at what spend/cost and on what platform are we producing the best results”.
Where it gets complex as a marketer is figuring out the touch-points that lead to revenue. For example, these are basic questions businesses should understand:
How long did it take for the lead to become a customer/client?
Did/does offline media (print, mail, TV, radio, billboard) play a role?
Where did they come from? How did they get to our website?
What sealed the deal?
Aligning digital and traditional marketing
Digital marketing is really the use of technology to connect people with brands and services. The options are endless and ever-changing.
Traditional marketing is essentially anything that isn't digital marketing. Print advertising, billboards, direct mail, radio and TV ads.
The lines between traditional and digital marketing are blurring because the two work best when aligned.
For example, if you're running a TV ad campaign, promote the same offer on your social media and lead them to the same destination like your website. Or if you are running a magazine/newspaper ad, create the same content on your website that supports the campaign.
Where are enterprises messing up?
Disconnected marketing = bad customer experience = 😡 = bad reviews = no growth
The real reason why businesses unintentionally create bad customer experiences is disconnection within the company. Instead of investing in macro and micro improvements as a whole team, companies are creating separate teams.
Another problem is that companies focus too much on creating KPIs which makes teams chase what we call “vanity metrics” for fluffy macro goals - which don’t mean much to anyone. The only thing vanity metrics do is allow teams to track the same thing, together, but separately (if you get the drift).
What does the internal disconnection look like to end consumers?
The company doesn’t seem to recognise me (a keen customer)
Confusing information = distrust
Being referred to different departments like an endless cycle
Just a waste of time
Optimizing Customer experience
Digital marketing actually follows a traditional model - online or offline we apply the same mentalities.
What we do get from digital is data and database marketing which is marketing science. AI never stops learning about your customer. Use the learnings to personalise the user experience.
Particularly in this period of time of mass-resignations and shifts in work culture, everyone's needing to optimize and get cross-functionality out of their teams. AI fills this gap really well quite quickly and will most likely cost a lot less. There’s also no manual number crunching which is a huge plus.
Then we've got the database governance you know, GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is obviously a thing (actually a huge LEGAL thing). You can no longer take data as you please - there are rules and of course consequences. Please read this if you didn’t know.
Why should you care? Because it's going to significantly affect digital marketing in the next two years.
Being aware of these challenges will help inform your choices as you work to market your business online. Don’t ignore offline data as what happens in-store should work together with online data.
