Typical decision-making mistakes in digital marketing campaigns
Last week we looked at how to choose a reliable digital marketing agency. We went around the questions you should and must ask to see if you’re putting your campaigns in the right hands. Once you’ve chosen an agency, you still can’t be completely sure of success. There are countless decision-making mistakes that you need to avoid in order to achieve the goals and successes you have set.
In the more than 17 years of WebMa’s existence, we have come across many decision-making mistakes, which we have now collected for you to help you achieve the expected results within the time and budget you have set for yourself.
Let’s see what to look out for.
Get a strategy
In order to advertise consciously and effectively on the myriad of tools provided by digital media, you need to know exactly what your goal is. You need accurate numbers, facts and data-driven decision making, otherwise you’ll just burn your money and not get the results you expect. Without a sound digital marketing strategy, you’re shooting sparrows with a cannon. How many times have we heard the following desperate phrases from our new clients.
- We advertise everywhere, but we still don’t get any enquiries.
- We are spending more and more, but sales are not increasing.
- We do get enquiries, but they are very expensive.
- The number of inquiries we get is good, but in the end we can’t close the deal.
- We have gained a lot of followers on Facebook/TikTok/Instagram, yet revenue is not increasing.
- We’ve made several changes to the website, yet the number of conversions is not showing.
The explanation for these criticisms is usually quite simple: you are advertising in the wrong place, with the wrong intensity, content and budget, so your tactics are not right. This brings us to the most important point:
Strategy does not equal tactics
As the Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu wrote in his book The Art of War 2,500 years ago, “Strategy without tactics is the slowest way to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” These two are not contradictory, in fact. They play as a team. But which is which?
The strategy sets out the long-term goals and the path to achieve them. Tactics, on the other hand, are the smaller, shorter steps that can be taken along the path that the strategy has set out for us.
Key elements for developing the strategy:
- Define what you want to achieve?
- Define what you don’t want.
- How soon do you want to achieve it?
- Who will be the target group?
- What will be your value proposition to them? How will you differentiate yourself from your competitors? (USP)
- What resources do you have to do all this? (Think of both material and human factors.)
Once you’ve done that, you can move on to the next tactical questions:
- How will you do this?
- What do you need to change to achieve it?
- Where can you reach the target group and with what message?
- Who will do all this?
Once we have asked ourselves the last question, we have come to the next mistake, which we very often make.
Don’t focus on the costs, focus on the return
It’s not even worth starting an digital marketing campaign if you think of the available budget as a cost. No. Marketing is an investment.
This is often compounded by the misconception that digital marketing is free. Indeed, there are some areas (e.g. search engine optimisation) that do not involve advertising or media costs – but you still have to pay for the SEO specialist’s salary or the content production etc.
If you have a website built for a lot of money and then have no additional budget for digital marketing, it’s like buying the car of your dreams and then not wanting to spend on fuel.
Expenses are items without which your business could not function: water, electricity, rent, technology, etc. and which add no value back to your business.
Investment, on the other hand, is an expense that, if your strategy was right, will pay for itself and return value. The good news is that you can calculate this return accurately – our online ROAS calculator can help you do this.
Let’s take a simple example
If the customer wants to get a lot of cheap visitors to their website (the wrong tactic), but their strategy is to increase the effectiveness, they are thinking wrong. The table below clearly shows that simply getting more visitors at a lower price (where the quality of visitors is not the issue, only the quantity) does not guarantee higher effectiveness, in fact. Targeting quality visitors, while it may cost more, and thus may result in fewer visitors overall, at a higher CPC, even at a higher agency fee, will generate more profit from the same budget.
Cheap visitor tactics | Quality visitor tactics | |
Budget | 800 000 Ft | 800 000 Ft |
Number of visitors | 5333 | 4000 |
Cost per visitor (CPC) | 150 Ft | 200 Ft |
Conversion rate | 1,00% | 2,80% |
Number of conversions | 53 | 112 |
Cost of 1 conversion | 15 000 Ft | 7 143 Ft |
Value of 1 conversion | 40 000 Ft | 40 000 Ft |
Revenue | 2 133 333 Ft | 4 480 000 Ft |
Agency fee | 200 000 Ft | 400 000 Ft |
Profit | 1 133 333 Ft | 3 280 000 Ft |
But to do this, you need to have systems in place that allow you to track your marketing spend.
And this brings us to the next important point:
Measure your results
If you have been focusing on revenue, you may not be getting the best return. After all, the return on the HUF invested in digital marketing is not always the same.
It is important to identify which KPIs are worth monitoring. You can’t be happy with thousands of followers on your Facebook page if they don’t end up becoming engaged customers of your brand. There is much more information in the data that shows the activity of followers within your page. There are countless tools that you can use to find out how much customer interaction on a particular interface contributed to the final conversion. You shouldn’t focus solely on the number of leads you receive if the majority of those leads are not qualitative. It’s no use getting 50 leads a day if none of them convert.
With Webma’s ROI calculator, you can easily check the effectiveness of your current advertising on a lead-generating website.
Once you have the results, you will be able to constantly adjust your tactics based on real data to reach the goal you set in your strategy. Importantly, the tactics you set out in the first round will need to be changed frequently in the light of metrics and results.
As a business or marketing manager, if you work along these principles and are open to new ideas and trends, you can improve the performance and ultimately the effectiveness of your campaigns by reviewing your key performance indicators (KPIs).
This brings us to the next common mistake you shouldn’t make.
Make an informed decision
We can agree that objective information is more useful than subjective information, which may or may not reflect reality. Fortunately, the lion’s share of customers’ shopping journeys and enquiries are now online and all the associated digital data is readily available, if we are savvy.
If you collect, organise, analyse and use this data properly, you will be able to make informed decisions. Take advantage of the new possibilities of Google Analytics 4.
According to a SmartInsights survey, proper analysis of available marketing data is key for 44% of businesses, with 43% saying that marketing data helps them attribute revenue to marketing activities.
Decide what to do in-house and what to outsource?
Assess what capacities are available in-house and where you want to hire new internal people, and what are the areas where you should definitely hire an external team of experts.
Quality should always be the primary consideration in this decision. It’s no use entrusting a partner offering a very competitive price to manage your campaigns or maintain your social media pages if they don’t have the knowledge or capacity to achieve your goals. You can find useful tips on how to make the right choice in our previous article. It’s good to know what you can expect for your money from the professionals you trust. In our career (17+ years), we have never met one person who was an expert in every field.
Be patient
We know that everyone wants results yesterday. But it’s important to understand that in the world of digital marketing, where data and artificial intelligence (AI)-based systems “work for us” and go through a learning phase as well. Even if you’ve created your new digital marketing strategy, developed the right tactical steps and found the best professional partner, success will still take time.
For example, you can expect to see positive results from your SEO strategy within 4-6 months, while a good blog may need 3-6 months to be properly crawled by Google search engines.
Google and Facebook ads will produce results faster than this, but even these need at least 2-3 weeks for the campaigns set up to “learn” and produce their first results.
Conclusion
If you want a successful digital marketing campaign, never start without a strategy. Take the time to understand the market, your competitors and yourself, and then set realistic goals. Then choose the right professional partners, develop your data-driven tactics together and measure the results. Digital marketing is not a fast train that delivers instant results. Never believe that getting a lot of visitors cheaply will bring better results than attracting customers at a slightly higher cost.
If you want to be in good hands with your campaigns or need help in developing your digital marketing strategy, contact the WebMa team with confidence.
If you need professional support for your digital marketing activities, do not hesitate to contact us!
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