Business owners generally fall into 2 categories: ones that utilize digital media and marketing and ones that don’t think it works. Overall, these 2 categories can be explained by the info graphic above; the owners who utilize digital marketing consistently have seen group “A”, the owners who don’t have mostly seen group “D”. It is really easy to market yourself now with social media, low cost website builders and content creators. Long gone is the time where you had to have a really experienced marketer just to get started. The inherent problem is that we are victims of the overwhelming number of marketing options. Without knowledge of how to make them work for you, you’ll never get to the highly optimized leads you need. Let’s look at all the stages from Broad to Highly Optimized.
D. Broad Traffic
If you are in business, you’ll have some form of traffic. Assuming you have some type of website, there will be people who search for you. This is also the place where many owners get disenfranchised with digital marketing in general. They setup social profiles, build a decent website and maybe even take a shot at Google AdWords. Google makes it very easy to just enter a keyword and go (Take a look at this blog we did for more information about AdWords). Then you spend money anticipating the phone to start ringing or new customers to come in. When it doesn’t happen, suddenly all the work you’ve done and money you’ve spent seems pointless. This is the worst place to stop and also the most difficult to move past without knowledge.
C. Moderately Defined Traffic
This is the point where we often meet clients; the the middle of their frustration. We login to their accounts to see all types of good attempts. Tracking is usually low before C; no analytics or pixels are installed and metric knowledge is not readily available. Especially in SEM, we consistently show where budgets were used for searches completely unrelated to what they intended. If you look at this blog about Adwords artificial intelligence you’ll see that there’s 493 custom audiences that you can choose. Then those audiences can be again modified by dozens of options. It’s extremely easy to get lost in AdWords once you let Google stop choosing for you. Adding “negative keywords” that haven’t been addressed happens here in addition to more specific location targeting. These words keep Google from serving ads to people who aren’t looking for your type of business. Imagine you have a yard tool that helps people with their lawn and you chose “yard tool” as a keyword. Someone searching “free yard tool” will trigger your search. Since you aren’t offering it for free, this is a waste of your money. In a best case scenario, your marketing efforts should start here (C) and not at D.
B. Specifically Defined Traffic
Unless you have had successful campaigns before, it’s very hard to get to B without C first. SEM is an organic tool that needs constant monitoring and tweaking. Once you see what is working and not working in C, you can add additional channels through means of SEO and specifically written blogs. Together the words in these sources work together to form a boost to your digital identity helping current clients and potential clients to see exactly what your goals are. No matter what type of business you operate, you need multiple marketing channels; one is never enough. This doesn’t mean you should spend time and money utilizing everything though. Different channels have different strengths and demographics. Good marketing agencies will be able to give you REAL METRICS in this stage. If they can’t then they don’t know what they are doing.
A. Highly Optimized
Ah, the best stage. Here, your conversion rates are very high. The vast majority of this traffic knows they are looking for your product, have some knowledge about it and are ready to purchase. Imagine someone standing with money in their hand saying “I want to buy now, please pay attention”. Getting to this point requires months of watching and learning. Totally optimized campaigns don’t happen overnight. Even if you have been in business for awhile, there are always new insights that come from your marketing. There are so many reports that a highly trained Marketing Agency can produce for you that are mind blowing. We show reports about users and the days after they first visit your site. When they come back, we can see why. When lots of them come back on a specific day, we can see that too. This data allows you to make better decisions about what your customers like. When you spend less time working on what isn’t successful and more on what is, everyone wins.
Don’t stop until you reach “A”. You never know how close you are to getting there. It takes hard work, but the reward for it will come eventually.
