You Have Your Marketing Plan, but Is It Giving You Results?
Nowadays we have many options to include in our marketing plan.
In this blog, we’ll focus on digital marketing.
Some of the options I’m sure you included are:
- Blogging
- Email automation
- Facebook ads
- SEO
- PPC
- Content marketing
- Influencer marketing
Sounds familiar?
On paper, creating a marketing plan sounds easy, but I’m sure that you quickly realized that the execution isn’t.
It’s very easy to get side tracked, desperate, and change your plan constantly with no tracking or real measurements in place.
The real truth is that all good plans need to be modified and adjusted, but always based on results.
It’s all about the tracking.
Let’s analyze the common reason why your digital marketing plan is not working.
Targeting the wrong audience
Not targeting the right people is the most common mistake.
Business owners always assume who their client is…
“I’m targeting oil and gas companies”
“My target are realtors”
“My target are anybody that needs xyz”, this one is the most scary.
Creating a buyer persona is fundamental to a successful marketing campaign.
Use this quick form to craft your buyer persona and start speaking their same language.
Not knowing your competitors
If I had a penny every time a business owner comes to me with a great idea! When I ask about their competitors they always say:
“Well…there’s not a lot of direct competition.”
“My product/service/idea has no competition. It’s new in the market!”
Really?
It’s 2017.
And even though we have Google, Bing, Yahoo, Facebook, and so many sources for free information, research is still ignored.
Doing a basic market research every time we have an idea is critical to have a successful marketing campaign.
Who are your competitors?
What are they doing?
How are they promoting content?
Are they using Hashtags?
These are some of the basic questions you need to answer.
If you are not on Facebook, it doesn’t mean that they are not in it.
If you don’t get leads on LinkedIn, it doesn’t mean they don’t get them.
Start following your competitors to learn from them.
No Metrics
Setting up metrics to track your success is a biggie.
Here are some examples to help you choose the correct metrics:
- Website Traffic Report
- Number of leads received per day
- Click through rate of emails, ads, everything!
- Conversion rate
- Social Media Shares & Likes
- Keyword and Density Analysis
- Referral source (how are they getting to your site?)
- Follow-up email response rate
- Sales Leads Quality
There’s a lot more that you can track, google analytics gives you many options, same with email marketing, and not even mention Facebook.
Sometimes we get overwhelm when we have too much on our plate. For now, just focus on tracking a few consistently before adding more.
Wrong content, timing, channel!
Here I’m going to talk again about knowing your audience.
You can be creating awesome blog posts, beautiful ebooks, great videos, podcasts, perfect social media posts, but none of these will give you the results that you want if…
…you create them in a language that they cannot understand;
…you post the same on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram;
…you post them at times when your audience is not active or the topic is no longer trending;
…you don’t have a call to action;
Knowing your audience is vital to create a successful campaign. The little template we created to find out your audience will help you determine the best time, channel, and content to create.
80% of Marketing Campaigns fail because they first fail on tracking.
So, to summarize, the key to a successful marketing campaign:
- Test & Measure
- Be Consistent
We have created an easy 2-page Marketing Action Plan Template to get started on the right foot. Download it for free ?
Remember, everything you do should be tracked
What metrics are you using, or plan to use, to track your digital marketing campaign?
