Digital marketing is funny in a way — it seems quite easy to understand, if you give it a chance.
When you get down to doing it, however, it can literally break your back, make your mind numb, and it can make you run in circles.
Add information overdose to this and soon you have every reason in the world to quit thinking about digital marketing.
But you can’t afford to quit. Can you? No. The answer is no.
Google search accounts for 1.2 trillion monthly searches worldwide. Your customers are all on Facebook (over 2 billion of them in total, and counting) engaging, sharing, commenting, or maybe silently checking their newsfeeds while they are on mobile (at least 80% of Facebook users are on mobile).
We see many individuals and small business owners bogged for a variety of reasons: ranging from laziness all the way to information overwhelm or just a general breakdown of the ability to make decisions and take action.
Information overload is real. It does take a lot of research to get effective digital marketing done. Also, it takes a long time to get all the moving parts working to the point where you start seeing results.
All of this is understandable.
However, information overload and distractions shouldn’t stop you from focusing on the digital marketing actions that are important and meaningful for your business.
There are many reasons why you may consider quitting, when it comes to digital marketing. Here are some of the most common excuses people make, and the reasons they are wrong.
Digital Marketing Channels? Daunting!
There are distinct channels, techniques, tactics, strategies that make digital marketing work for your business. There’s no one channel that trumps the other. To promote your brand, website, products, and services — you could possibly take an endless array of paths to reach the same goals.
The digital marketing channels you pick, the efforts you put in, and the exact pathways you’d take depend a lot on the type of business you run, your goals, resource (or lack of any), budgets (or the lack of it), and so much more.
None of that means that digital marketing has to be daunting or “undoable”.
Pick any traditional business (like retail) and you’ll end up doing more in a traditional business than an online business.
The web doesn’t make things easier, just gives a smarter way.
SEO is dead
You always hear one think or another that goes something like this: “SEO is dead.”
It’s not; it’s just changing. Everyday. For the better.
Google will keep making new updates only to make the web a better place and to reward publishers and businesses who take the trouble to create content that adds real value.
There are only a few legitimate ways to make SEO work for your business:
- Focus on exceptional content, all the time, every time. Insert a keyword or two but don’t overdo it and don’t write for search engines. Write for people instead.
- Don’t try to get links. Instead, earn those links. If you follow the previous point regularly, you’ll soon get there. You can also earn links legitimately by offering to do high-quality guest posting.
- Content curation is an exceptional way to earn links too. Make that a part of your content marketing strategy using easy to use tools like Curately.
Facebook is Evil; Google Adwords is expensive
Facebook won’t be the same anymore. Yes, Google Adwords is expensive if you don’t know what you are doing.
None of these statements should affect the work you’d need to put in, each day.
Facebook will fight “the fight” about data privacy laws and will release new features to make advertising well worth each advertising dollar spent while still respecting users’ privacy.
As more advertisers take to paid advertising on Google, a few keywords will always be more expensive than others.
When you manage your paid advertising properly (and by doing all the right things), the cost per acquisition (CPA) of your ads will come down.
You’ll spend less than your competition does and you’ll be able to get a return on your investment.
Funnels will take care of themselves
We said this before, and it bears repeating: Funnels are not “set it and forget it” miracles. They don’t work on their own without any work at all. For funnels to work, you’ll need continuous optimization and A/B testing.
You need to work on your funnels before your funnels work for you. Do the work now and then allow your sales funnels work miracles on autopilot.
Sales funnels are also not a choice; they are a mandate. They are necessary. Your business doesn’t exist if they don’t.
Marketing automation is hard
You might not be able to execute the level of automation that Amazon does but you can emulate their results, on a smaller scale, without the huge budget they expend.
You can choose a marketing stack that helps you accomplish certain levels of automation or you can have marketing automation experts or funnel specialists to build, manage, and make marketing automation work for your business.
Anything of the above things that you spend time worrying about needlessly takes time away from what you should be doing instead.
What’s stopping you from proper digital marketing execution? If you’d like to get on a scheduled strategy call, we’ll be happy to talk.