If you have been marketing your business for any length of time, the inevitable question to ask yourself comes at the end of the advertising campaign. Did the campaign “work”?
What the heck does “work” mean anyway?
If I’ve learned one thing though my time in marketing, its that “work” means different things to different people. Does “work” to you mean growing your social media by 1000 followers, increasing new business by 5%, getting to the top of the search engine, or branding your name in the marketplace? Each of these goals will require a completely different internet marketing strategy.
The word “work…” is subjective, and can mean just about anything.
If the internet marketer is knowledgeable about your business, the campaign is functioning properly, and has the advertisers measurable goal in mind, the campaign should mostly always “work” to meet the businesses needs. Everything online is trackable through historical trends, averages, and percentages to achieve success.
With internet marketing and digital media in particular, everything is trackable. From the amount of people who see your ad, click to come to your website, call you, buy something online, sign up for your newsletter, to the people who leave without doing anything. Each step is able to be tracked along the way, and calculating percentages of visitors and conversions can make it fairly easy for an internet marketer to create a campaign and budget that will deliver a desired result for a client.
Part of the reason why I think Florida internet marketing campaigns sometimes “don’t work”, is that there is a difference between the business owner and internet marketer about what the actual goals of the campaign are. (or the marketer is just plain inexperienced and presents the wrong plan).
Most times when posed with the question: “what are your goals” People will respond “get more customers” or “increase profits”. These are not campaign goals. These are both vague results that will surely end up with a disconnect between what the 2 parties are looking for with the end result.
You would think that the businesses would always want the most leads possible, but maybe not… if I am talking to a very small business, and I bring them 1000 new customers in a month that they are not equipped to handle, and because of this, the processes start failing and their service starts to fall… then the campaign definitely “didn’t work” for that client.
Or what if the campaign generates a lot of leads for people that were too far away from the business and none of them buy anything. Or people calling in for products the business doesn’t even sell. Both are marketer fails based on incorrect geography and targeting.
All these things need to be taken into account when setting up a digital marketing campaign to begin with, and can lead to disaster if all the right questions aren’t asked.
Many internet marketers also don’t ever even ask about profit margin, what a customer is worth to a business owner, closing percentages, etc. These are things that help to ensure that the campaign will “work” when its all said and done… but a lot of internet marketers are too busy selling products instead of listening to needs of a client and put together a plan that “works”.
For example… If an attorney needs 5 new clients this month for a campaign to “work”, now there is a baseline to judge success. How many leads does that attorney need to close 5 clients? How much is each client worth to the attorney? These type of questions are the ones that the marketer needs to find out in order to budget the right campaign that will ensure success. It would be tough to make a case for a campaign that would “work” without asking questions like this one about someones business.
In my experience with Florida businesses, Internet Marketing should always “work” at least to some degree. Analytic data helps the cause by tracking all the results from the clients website. Through analytics, a good internet marketer will easily be able to tell how many website visitors are needed to generate the right amount of leads to the attorney to make sure that he gets his 5 clients for the month.
Make sure your marketers are asking the right questions, listening to your needs, and has a good product, and you should mostly always see a campaign that “works” for what your goals are.
