Why Digital Marketing Fails

Digital marketing is a body for all efforts put into online marketing.  Most firms leverage digital platforms like search engines, websites, social media, YouTube, and many online advertisements to drive their marketing goals, brand visibility, user engagement customer attraction, etc.

In other words, digital marketing strategies are ways to meet online marketing goals.

One cogent reason for digital marketing failure is how marketers confuse tactics with strategies.

These strategies must be formed with a single goal in mind. But this single goal includes various strategies for different aims, and objectives.

Without a set goal, you are likely to garner non-measurable results that will eventually be a waste of time and resources.

This is to say that digital marketing strategies fail because marketers try to fulfil so many goals at a time.

What constitutes a Digital Marketing strategy?

Digital Marketing Strategies are paths that businesses take to achieve specific goals. Therefore, here are what constitutes a digital marketing strategy.

1. Goals: The goal for launching a digital marketing strategy must be identified. Whether to increase traffic, increase sales, reach a wider audience, or retain existing customers. This will help to know what kind of content to put out. In other words, your goals should be measurable.
2. Purpose – The purpose of your digital marketing strategy could be either for brand awareness, brand building, product awareness or to drive an increase in sales, etc. must be established.
3. Customer Profile – You need to figure out and understand the demographics of your audience or customers. This helps in determining if your marketing will be pictorial, explainer videos, animations or live-action videos.
4. Location – You need to be sure of the cities, countries, or continents your audience is. Studying and understanding the demography of your customers helps to identify which locations to focus on thereby saving you time, stress, and money.
5. The time frame for ROI – Sometimes the reason why digital marketing strategies fail is that marketers fail to predict and set the time frame for ROI. They expect immediate returns from a strategy that would actually take a year to yield results.

Here are some of the reasons for the failure of Digital Marketing Strategies

1. Excessive push efforts with little or no pull communication
   Most digital marketers often forget the importance of a pull communication effect when they set out to achieve a digital marketing strategy. A pull communication effect is designed in a way that audiences or customers are willing to be a part of the marketing goals of a campaign. Most digital marketers put out a form of marketing campaign where they insist that the audience or customers fulfill their goals.It is important to balance the push and pull effects such that the customers do not feel compelled to be a part of your marketing campaign.
2. Lack of synergy
   All marketing strategies both offline and online must be in sync and focused on a particular goal. Contradicting marketing efforts or campaigns may result in diverse brand images and brand disposition in the minds of the audience or customers.
   You must ensure that the offline marketing strategy of your brand must speak the same message as your online brand marketing.
3. Poor research
   As a marketer, you should be focused on your customers. Your brand should know its audience, its wants, needs, and luxury. Digital marketing should cater to the needs of your audience. Search engine and content marketing should focus on keywords and details while social media and email marketing should be centred around user trends and engagement.
   Research should however be carried out carefully so that your audience or customers’ needs are understood.
4. Less attention on customers or audience
   When the focus shifts from your customers to your product, you may end up ruining the whole marketing campaign. You should bear in mind that your brand is not about you but about the people who are consuming your products or services.
5. Lack of flexibility
   The digital business space is highly dynamic than the regular business world. Rigid campaigns or strategies with fixed tactics don’t usually thrive in the digital business space. Once you have set goals, strategies, campaigns, tactics may need to be tweaked regularly to ensure that the ever-changing needs of your online audience and customers are constantly met.
6. Inability to create a time-frame
   Some digital marketers bow to failed digital marketing strategies because of a wrongly created time frame for results to yield from a digital marketing campaign. Digital marketing campaigns/ efforts, like every other marketing effort, need time to yield the desired result. You should therefore ensure that you predict a reasonable time frame for your digital marketing campaigns before they can be regarded as either a success or a failure.

In conclusion, you need a properly detailed outline that is centered around your clients, to determine which digital marketing strategy to adopt. At Boldfruit, we ensure you adopt the right digital marketing strategy needed to meet your business goals.