5 Ways You’re Wasting Your Digital Marketing Budget
There are different ways to promote your brand. You can launch events where you can talk about your business. You can print flyers and wait outside a shopping venue and give them away to random customers. You can pay for a TV ad. However, it’s impossible to think of marketing without the aid of the Internet.
Digital marketing is the top choice of the post-modern entrepreneur or business owner. It’s not easy, but it’s practicable for anyone regardless of their budget. That means, you have an opportunity to grow your business online whether you have money to burn or you’re working within limited funds.
SEO, content marketing, email marketing, social media marketing, and influencer marketing are just some of the things that come to mind when we speak of digital marketing, which in reality is an aggregate of a multitude of approaches and strategies.
Although we see the value of all these practices, we understand the skepticism of many of our clients. After all, putting up websites, maintaining social media channels, and producing content are not free. They never were. They entail cost. You invest in them, and at some point you want to make sure your investment works for you.
We won’t lie. We’ve seen and done mistakes in the past, and we’re sharing to you what works against your marketing budget. It doesn’t matter whether you invested ten thousand or one thousand dollars on a marketing plan. If it’s anchored in bad practices, it’ll fail.
One: You work too hard on gaining followers
One of the biggest misconceptions we keep debunking is the idea that following is everything. Indeed, getting followers is important. You need to have an audience. Your website needs to have visitors. Your blog needs to have readers. Your Facebook business page needs to have followers. You need to have YouTube viewers. But focusing on the number of followers is one of the biggest mistakes in digital marketing.
The number of followers has some importance in your campaign. The more followers you have, the larger your network, and thus the bigger your chances of selling. That’s one part of the story. The other part is when your followers don’t care about your content, and there are a number of reasons why they don’t. It may have to do with the constant shift of social media algorithms. It may have to do with shifting trends. It may have to do with your content.
The important point here is, don’t put most of your social media marketing resources in hunting followers. To build relevant following is to build active following. Stimulate engagement.
Two: You expect quick returns
Marketing involves huge work that won’t pay off until several months after. It’s not an overnight deal wherein you put out your campaign and customers begin checking out your brand next morning. It doesn’t work like that. Content marketing takes a while because you will have to build authority before people start paying attention and taking your word for it. Social media marketing takes time because gaining people’s trust takes time. Influencer marketing takes time because you have to prove your worth.
People who want quick results tend to spend huge. It’s a huge gamble. There are two possible scenarios. One, the lavish marketing fails and so you go broke. Two, the tactic works. Huge amount of traffic goes to your site. You have an awesome number of orders. You have overwhelming conversion too soon. And you have no means of handling that amount of traffic and purchases.
The best growth is one that is gradual. You build following slowly through time. You build your consumer base, and as you do, you also build brand loyalty. Later you acquire brand advocates. At some point, your content reaches key people that potentially become your organic influencers. All these things require time. You don’t get them all at once.
Three: You don’t care about your audience
Most companies don’t care about their audience. They only care about profit. We hate to break it to you, but that’s the truth. Because they don’t care about their people, they invest little, if anything, to understanding them. They don’t know what their buyers want. Eventually, as trends shift, these companies suffer from consumer drift under their nose. Why? People gravitate towards places where their concerns and preferences matter.
Four: You don’t assess your marketing strategies
Your marketing tactics may be working or not, and you don’t know why. You’re doing everything as fine as you see, and purchases are steadily increasing. But you don’t know how you’re able to lure consumers. You don’t know which of your approaches worked. So you don’t know where to refocus your budget to get the most out of the strategies that propel your business forward. Thus, it’s inevitable that at some point your business will slow down and you also won’t determine what’s causing it to decline.
Five: You put all your marketing budget in a single campaign
Putting all your eggs in one basket is one of the worst marketing decisions ever, especially for starters. We keep stressing how important it is to test the waters and see where you’re going to get the most engagement and most inbound traffic from and which converts most audiences to customers. It takes a while. During that phase, you will have to spread your marketing budget on a number of activities, such as search engine marketing, social media marketing, and influencer marketing.
At some point, you will identify aspects that work. Then your next budget will be funneled to these activities to maximize growth. Or you can streamline the money into brand development. You can’t keep funding marketing ventures that give zero or little ROI.
