The number of channels, networks, platforms, websites, technical factors, content needs, and the constant changes by search engines make it a very dynamic and ever-changing layer of overall marketing plans and strategies.
I have a lot of stories about brands who tried things and quit, convinced that it didn’t work for their company.
There are also stories of brands who were convinced it would eventually work and poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into it, hoping it would eventually pay off.
The number of variables and factors to success within digital marketing, ranging from having the right people to the right environment, is high enough.
Maybe your biggest challenges aren’t your personal, team, or department’s obstacles. Maybe they are outside of digital marketing.
No matter your situation – whether you’re eager to invest in digital marketing strategies and channels or are already investing and not getting the expected return – your problem might not be in the channels themselves or the disciplines of SEO and PPC.
You might have jumped to a phase of the digital marketing process without getting through some important prerequisites related to target audience definition, product/service development, brand strategy, and sales operations.
Without the right infrastructure or foundation in place, you might need to pause efforts or at least take a step back and evaluate your gaps to ensure that your digital marketing and search strategy is aligned with your company’s core essence and ongoing customer relationships.
I’ll unpack five hidden, or sometimes just hard to navigate, non-digital marketing aspects that can impact your digital marketing ROI.
1. Stakeholders Who Don’t Define The Target Audience
It goes without saying that at a base level, to do digital marketing – and especially SEO and PPC – you have to have an identified target audience.
In some cases, I have been handed a wealth of persona data, research data about prospects and customers, customer interviews, and intelligence to craft my search marketing strategy and plan.
Sometimes, I have been given just some information through my own discovery questions and have had to do a lot of my own research within keyword research tools, search intent research, and SERP features analysis.
Whatever the organization’s starting point and sophistication, if you ask some basic questions about the target audience to stakeholders responsible for product/service development, sales, finance, customer service, or even field technicians and get inconsistent or incomplete answers, then you have a yellow flag at best and possibly a red flag.
Even if you can target some people who were mentioned by some stakeholders and get them to convert, down the line, you may have issues with them getting all the way to a customer.
If you’re a search marketer or digital marketer focused on a specific channel, it typically isn’t your job to make corporate decisions on who to target or why.
However big or small your organization is, you will experience some of the same issues if you don’t have well-defined, consistent definitions of who your target audience is.
2. Clients Who Think They Have No Competitors
I’ve been down some interesting roads with clients who have brand-new products. It is always exciting to hear about a new idea, service, or product that someone invented.
I have been involved in or cheered on many product and service launches, some of which have created brand-new markets or disrupted entire industries.
Those are groundbreaking moments – and in some cases, the product or service was described as having no competitors.
That can be an issue if you can’t at least figure out who might be the right target or what competitors are selling something (even if different or inferior) when it comes to translating to audiences and targeting.
I can’t count the number of times a client has told me they have no competitors. I take them at their word and know that they are right about the product or service.
However, when it comes to other brands already in their industry or adjacent spaces, there’s always someone showing up for a Google search or eating up display inventory somewhere.
Or, if you’re the only one, then you need to go back to the target audience item that I noted previously, as you haven’t found a real audience but have one that is hypothetical and doesn’t know about the problem you’re solving.
Getting your product or service dialed in, defined, and consistently understood by your full organization is critical.
If you’re marketing to the wrong audiences, focusing on the wrong features or benefits, or using the wrong set of competitors as your reference points, your digital marketing results might drive some activity but suffer from not achieving the desired ROI.
3. A Lack Of Brand Strategy To Guide You
Knowing your audience and your product/service is important when it comes to your targeting, competitor research, and being on the same page to maximize who you can reach and convert.
However, in the absence of a brand strategy and guidance, you might find that you sound just like everyone else in the space or you have an audience of none.
Brand strategy is important – not just the visual identity or voice and tone, but knowing what is truly distinctive about the product, distilled down into messaging that will resonate with the target audience.
In my experience, that is a great blend of common language and knowledge so we can target our audience, but also unique storytelling, messaging, and aspects that set our products/services apart.
Whether you’re starting with a robust brand strategy with information handed to you or have to work through it on the fly, it is important; otherwise, you risk being inconsistent, off-brand, or lost in the crowd while spending a lot of ad dollars and labor to ultimately just blend in.
4. Not Knowing How The Product Is Being Sold
I won’t use this space to discuss all the exhaustive sales versus marketing battles or misalignments that happen. I’m going to assume you have a great relationship with sales.
Or, at the least, that any differences can be reconciled through some workshopping and hard work to get on the same page – all topics for a different article, book, or training.
What you do need to know is how the team is selling your product or service. (For fully ecommerce, DTC, or zero touch sales process firms, then you can skip to the next section and double the impact of it.)
That might mean getting deep into how they use CRM, demos, sales scripts, what language they use, and all things related to their sales process.
Knowing all that, then digging deep into what a good lead is, a bad lead, qualification criteria, and how organized they are will help you tremendously.
Maybe there’s a sophisticated sales operation, maybe not.
In either case, knowing how products/services are sold, what language is used, what the process is, and how a digital marketing conversion becomes an actual customer can be really valuable for upstream targeting and messaging in your campaigns.
5. Not Having Insight Into Customer Service
A definite hidden issue in digital marketing ROI that isn’t typically in the marketing team’s responsibilities is customer service.
That includes everything from communication during the time products or services are being delivered, to every touchpoint someone might have with your brand.
Customer lifetime value is big to most companies I’ve worked with. It is much cheaper to have someone come back and continue to buy versus the cost of marketing to acquire a new customer.
Beyond that, the value in customer affinity due to referrals, word of mouth, and reviews they leave is important – even for businesses that have a high frequency of customers who only need them once in their lives.
Knowing what makes for a “good” customer, the type that has lifetime value, gives positive reviews, and who you can use for helpful information to target more people just like them, the easier it will make your job.
When customer service teams don’t have a lot of information, aren’t equipped, or are getting a lot of complaints, you can dig into the function itself, the product/service, the brand, or even the target audience who is buying and gain some valuable insights to help optimize not just your marketing, but broader business aspects that are outside of digital marketing yet impact your ROI.
Non-Digital Factors Can Help You Find An A-Ha Moment
Whether you’re someone in a digital marketing role accountable to ROI or oversee it at any level, knowing the full picture of what can impact success is important.
So long ago that I don’t want to mention the year, I was able to do a lot in SEO by myself and not have as many variables.
I’m not here to say the old days were better, though. I’m a big fan of getting things right, being distinctive as a brand, and being the right option for our target customers.
When we are the best for them, they find us, and they have an amazing experience, it is an authentic connection and we can celebrate the successes that come with it.
If you’re struggling with any missing info, not getting the conversions you expect, or aren’t making it through to meaningful ROI, before giving up or giving in, go back to the non-digital marketing factors and see if there’s an “ah ha” or something you can dig deeper into.
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