Digital Marketing

Why your digital marketing social media ROI is a failure

Digital Marketing is no longer optional, but at the same time you need to ensure that you are not running a digital campaign today (whether it is digital marketing or a social media campaign) just because everyone you know seems to be doing it.

Digital marketing requires you to understand aspects and strategies across branding, marketing, management, technology, sales, ROI  – Cost to conversions, customer journey, customer experience, digital touch points, SEO, content marketing, Pay Per Click, finance and budgeting etc. In other words, it’s not just about “which social networking site” do you need to run the campaign on?

It involves a systematic disciplined approach to ensure you have a successful digital marketing social media ROI campaign.

But, if you have experienced poor results or failure in terms of ROI while running a digital marketing campaign, you need to ensure that you pay serious attention to the following:

Why your digital marketing social media ROI is a failure:

1. Unclear GOALS: Your goals revolve around website hits, likes, followers, traffic online, impressions etc. You need to move over vanity metrics and focus on real ROI for your digital campaigns.
2. No plan for “Customer experience and journey”: If your digital strategy has an unclear  plan for how your customers will find you, reach you, be aware about your brand, services, engage or connect with you in real-time, give feedback, post their queries etc then there is no way your campaign would achieve any form of success. Ensuring that your customer digital touch points are clearly well defined will ensure your digital marketing strategy success to a great extent.
3. Your product or service does not give a real solution and neither does it fulfill a need: Problem at root level. Poor understanding or perception about what your brand or product or service actually caters too. Many times, we live inside a bubble “assuming” things. In the world of business, assumption has no place. Concrete data in terms of whether your product or service really caters to a problem is a must. If your business does not have a clear SOLUTION, then irrespective of how or how much you advertise and or promote, there wont be customers lined up enquiring for the same.
4. Social media or digital marketing is not about websites: As an organization, if your first question was, “Which social networking site do we need to promote on?” while planning your campaign, then you need to restart. Social media or digital marketing is not about hits, likes, follows etc. It was, is and will always be about People. People buy from People they Trust. Humanize Your brand and connect with the customer within.
5. Me, Me and Me: If your content across your blog, website, social networking platform seems to be always promoting your products and services all the time, you have a clear disconnect of this medium. You need to empower your brand and team to engage users by creating RELEVANT content that can add value to your end users. It helps to build trust, connect and engage in real-time conversations which lead to “purchases”. Content marketing using a clear customer insight approach, analytics, data, keywords, SEO, relevant and resourceful content using a content calendar is an integral part of your digital marketing campaign strategy.
6. Feedback and Response: Did you give users an option to share their feedback about your brand, product or services? If you did, did you take your time out as a business to look into the feedback and do something about it? Not taking feedback or much worse, taking feedback and doing nothing about it creates an impression that you really do not care about your customers and it shows a complete disconnect between your prospect/customer and your organization. Show your customers you care. Add value, resolve their pain areas, go a step further to build a relationship by creating content, resource, information that they will really find resourceful and insightful. This will help you build a long term business relationship based on mutual respect and trust with exceptional brand loyalty.
7. Analytics: Unless your digital marketing campaign starts with analytics and company data, it will be as though you are shooting a moving target in the dark. Use analytics across google analytics, facebook insights, instagram insights, twitter analytics, etc to understand your customer or prospects digital journey and requirements. Create a custom designed and or personalized experience using information shared and or provided by them. For eg. if you as a business are asking your customers to fill in a long form which asks about their lifestyle habits, education, age group, interests etc and your content presented to them ends up being “general”, then there is a huge disconnect. Similarly, if your analytics shows that majority of the users browse your site using smartphones or tablets etc and if your site’s UI is not responsive, or your browser does not support the content or plugins you have added, this would also result in a complete failure right at stage one of your campaign.
8. No PPC plan: Assuming that the moment your content goes live, be it news, information, blog post, new product or service launch etc, everyone online is going to be simply waiting to read about the same is a big mistake. Billions of tweets, posts, content, videos etc are consumed hourly across the globe. In today’s rigidly competitive environment, unless you have a strategy and plan for a pay per click campaign using tools like facebook ads, google adwords, twitter ads, linkedin ads, native advertising, influencer marketing, social media contests etc you are going to be in serious trouble. Its a very competitive world out there and you need to have a clear plan and strategy to invest in the right set of PPC for your campaign from time to time.
9. SEO: SEO as in Search Engine Optimization is not about stuffing keywords on your site anymore. It includes various factors like content quality, relevance, links, resourcefulness, timing, platform, site UI, keywords, type of posts, social media feeds, reviews, ratings, etc. Invest in a good SEO campaign for your digital marketing efforts today.
10. New age media tools and process: Strategies like Gamification, integrating tools like Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), BigData, Internet of Things (IoT) etc can go a long way today. Ensure that your customers will really find value and only then invest in the same and not just for the frenzy of it. Integrating such power packed tools, process and features ensures that you have taken into consideration core factors that you as an organization or a brand truly want to give something more to your prospects and customers, an actual feel, an immersive experience of your brand, products and services.
11. Realistic Goals, timeline and Budget: You have planned for a massive goal and assumed everything in social media or digital is either free or cheap. If you don’t invest in your brand, no one else will. Also, the fact of the matter is, if you pay peanuts, you only get monkeys. So, value your brand and invest in a good team. Have a clear understanding on how to budget for digital marketing social media ROI campaigns.
12. Digital Transformation: Wonderful, you have planned a great campaign and have a well invested budget. But your team needs massive digital skill upgradation. Employee development programs across Top tier organizations for corporate training on digital marketing is core today. It’s extremely crucial that your digital transformation process is not just about new tools, devices but also employee development across skills, strategies, hands-on case study based training across digital marketing and social media for real ROI success.

In other words, “Failing to plan is planning to fail ~ Alan Lakein”

So always ensure that your digital marketing social media campaign strategies do not have these flaws and rather is well planned, designed, monitored, tracked and measured for improvement and to ensure digital campaign ROI success for your business.

“Digital Marketing is not a one time strategy. It is a daily effort with a sincere idea to add value to end users”

Hope you found this resourceful.

Do share your comments, views on this with me, would love to hear from you.

Have a wonderful day ahead.

If you are looking for customized Digital Marketing campaigns or Corporate Training programs for your esteemed organization, Reach Us Here NOW using the quick contact form Link

Ananth V

Let’s Connect – Facebook – Twitter – LinkedIn – Social Media Book – Learn Digital marketing – Corporate Training

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