For many businesses, digital marketing has been a rollercoaster of a ride. Perhaps at one point, you outsourced your digital marketing strategy to get help, only to bring it back in-house to cut down on costs. Maybe you were always a DIY fan, handling your own website build and implementing your own online marketing strategies.
And, in some cases, handling your own digital marketing works out just fine. But, in other scenarios, it could be costing you a large amount of money. Poorly managed digital marketing can lead to lost revenue and can cause you to overspend on ill-performing campaigns.
The key is to recognize the signs of when it is time to get outside help with your digital marketing. The following are seven key indications that you need to seek professional help for your digital marketing strategy.
#1: You Aren’t Running Any Digital Marketing Campaigns
In 2021, if you don’t have a digital marketing strategy, you need to form one. Since the pandemic, the world has become increasingly reliant on digital interactions with businesses and brands.
For many businesses, the reasons why they have yet to invest in a digital strategy are complex. It could be because:
- You haven’t seen the importance of it until now, believing that in-person interactions are the way to go. If 2020 has given us anything, it is a wake-up call around the critical importance of digital interactions with our customers.
- You haven’t had the budget to put into digital marketing strategies. Often, this is simply a myth around what it takes to compete in a digital space and a lack of understanding around the profits being lost by not being present online.
- You have been given bad advice and are tired of the run-around. Unfortunately, some businesses have been led down the wrong path. This can cause companies to give up on digital marketing as a whole.
Whatever your reasoning has been for not investing in digital marketing, the time has come to put that aside. With the digital transformation that took place in 2020, take the time to vet a quality agency and begin building a quality digital experience for your customers.
#2: You’re Increasing Spend Without Return
If you find you are spending more and more on your digital marketing strategy each month, but your return on investment isn’t increasing in sync, it might be time to get the help of a professional.
Often, businesses waste large amounts of marketing dollars on poorly optimized campaigns. If you don’t pay close attention to your ad spend, you can wind up dumping money into campaigns that deliver poor results. This is particularly true if you are operating in a highly competitive or crowded market.
Every week, you should be adjusting your ad spend based on key metrics. You should constantly be optimizing every single digital campaign from social media ads to Google display.
In many cases, this takes the help of a pro. A professional is better equipped to understand what your analytics mean and how you can improve your campaign strategy accordingly.
#3: You’re Losing Traction in Your Market
Perhaps you started out on top of your market, or maybe you’ve always landed somewhere in the middle when it comes to digital marketing success. If, however, you suddenly find that you are losing traction, it might be time to seek out additional help.
What might cause you to suddenly lose traction in a market you were otherwise dominating?
It could be because:
- You’re using outdated marketing tactics. Digital marketing is constantly evolving. What was the best practice five years ago might not be relevant any longer. Make sure you are using the latest techniques and strategies to succeed.
- You aren’t tapping into new channels. Digital marketing is becoming holistic. If you aren’t tapping into all the right channels, you might begin to lose traction. For example, you might have simply run a Google ad campaign at one point in time and called it a day. But now, you need to pair this with a social media campaign to effectively reach your customers.
- You’ve lost touch with your audience. Today, consumers expect highly targeted messaging. If you aren’t harnessing the power of customer data properly, you can begin to see your numbers plummet. When customers are served ads that they deem irrelevant, you quickly become white noise. Digital marketing now requires a highly targeted approach.
Reaching out to a professional team can help you diagnose the cause for your sudden decline, and it can mean all the difference in turning your results around.
#4: Your Strategy is Disjointed
Sometimes, marketing strategies are born out of necessity. And, over time, new tactics and new team members are added on to lend a hand.
Unfortunately, what can take place during this hodgepodge approach is that a strategy becomes extremely disjointed. You might be dumping money into Google ads while also running an entirely different social media campaign. Your marketing team might not be communicating with your sales team, which in turn isn’t sharing the same message with customers as your service department.
The result is that your messaging gets cloudy, and you potentially waste a lot of money on overlapped marketing spend.
Instead, you need to join all your marketing strategies together. Each channel should feed into the next, with data crisscrossing lanes to create a well-informed campaign.
If, for example, you are marketing to a specific segment of customers to advertise an upcoming sales event, your Google ad strategy, social media strategy, and direct mail campaign should all be working in sync toward the same measurable goals.
An outside professional can help you realign strategies and messaging, ensuring every team and tactic is working in one direction.
#5: Your Online Experience is Poor
Today, most businesses have a website. However, how well that website performs is another question. Added to the complexity is the fact that customers are becoming accustomed to seamless omnichannel experiences.
If you haven’t done so recently, take some time to test out your online experience. What happens if new leads land on your website via an ad? How well optimized is the landing page? Does it match what they would expect to see based on the ad they saw?
Keep diving further. How easy is it to contact your team? Do your forms autofill with the customer’s information?
From here, what happens to customer data? If they reach back out the next day, will your staff member have access to previous conversations and data on their current interests?
If you recognize that you have some weak points in your digital experience, you are not alone. Many businesses find it difficult to keep up with the increasing demand from their customers for multiple channel interactions.
This is where a professional can help you build the right customer journey flow to match your specific needs. This won’t look the same for every business, which is why you should work with a team that will take a customized approach.
#6: You’re Not Ready to Hire a Full-Time Marketing Team
For some businesses, when the time comes for more marketing help, the answer is to hire a full-time marketing team or manager. This can be a good solution when your company is large enough to support the expense of a full-time employee plus accompanying benefits.
However, this might not be a feasible reality for smaller businesses, which is where working with an agency can be the right solution. This allows you to invest according to your budget, adjusting that budget along the way based on how well your business is doing without putting anyone’s salary at risk.
In other cases, you might do best with a hybrid. Perhaps you have a team member who handles a lot of your marketing but is becoming overwhelmed with the scope of work. Having that team member outsource some of the workload can be a game-changer. It can also help introduce fresh new ideas into your digital marketing strategy, allowing you to test out tactics your competition isn’t yet trying.
#7: You’d Simply Rather Focus on What You Do Best
If you are a business owner or executive who has been handling your digital marketing alongside your normal role, it might be time to let this component of your company go. For many companies, having the owner or high-level management handle marketing makes a lot of sense as a business is first starting out.
However, over time, this can become a less than ideal scenario. With only so many hours in the day, it becomes difficult to keep up with your business’ increasing demands and everything necessary to run an effective digital marketing campaign.
What happens next is that balls get dropped and new strategies are overlooked.
The beauty of reaching out to a professional for assistance with your digital marketing is that it allows you to return your focus to what you do best — running your business! Often, once digital marketing work is taken off an owner or executive’s plate, that person can become far more effective at leading the business.
Talk to J&L Marketing About Help with Your Digital Marketing
If you notice the telltale signs that it is time to get help with your digital marketing, our team is here to assist. At J&L Marketing, we have worked with countless companies who came to the point in their journey where they needed the assistance of a professional team.
When you work with our team, you will be gaining all of the following benefits:
- Access to the latest and best industry tools
- Creative ideas to help your business outpace the competition
- Customized marketing strategies that leverage your business’ best differentiators
- Assistance creating messaging that is highly targeted based on customer personas
- Landing pages designed to capture leads based on specific campaigns
- Ongoing analysis of your campaign’s success with detailed reporting
Additionally, at J&L Marketing, we bring to the table years of industry expertise. We can free you up to focus on your business while we help you accelerate your digital marketing strategy forward.
Our work begins with a deep dive into your marketing strategy. From here, we move on to analyze your competition. Next, we help you design a custom digital marketing strategy. But after that, we aren’t done. We constantly analyze how well your marketing campaigns are going, adjusting spend and optimizing in real-time. The result is that you can spend less and see a higher return on your investment.
Reach out for a consultation today to learn more about how we can help you take back your digital marketing strategy.
