Digital Horizons

5 Digital Marketing Mistakes to Avoid!

• James Walker & Brian Hastings

Share episode

Unlock the secrets to supercharging your marketing efforts and avoid those common pitfalls that can stymie your business growth. What if your lack of proper tracking is costing you conversions without you even knowing? In our latest episode of Digital Horizons, we promise you’ll discover the vital importance of having robust tracking mechanisms in place and how trusting your data can lead to smarter, more effective marketing strategies. We dive deep into why cross-referencing data from multiple platforms is non-negotiable and the key to capturing a comprehensive picture of your true conversions, including those often-overlooked phone calls and email inquiries.

What’s the right balance between demand generation and demand capture for your brand? Too much focus on capturing demand might just lead to higher costs and stagnation, while too little investment in generating demand can mean missed opportunities. We’re here to help you understand that long-term success isn’t a sprint but a marathon. Learn how creating engaging content, leveraging multiple channels, and committing to long-term brand development can nurture potential customers and drive down acquisition costs. Plus, we shed light on why customer retention should never take a backseat—retaining loyal customers can be far more cost-effective than chasing new ones.

Finally, let’s talk about the power of leveraging marketing specialists to achieve extraordinary results. You don't have to master every aspect of marketing to succeed. By focusing on your strengths and delegating complex tasks to experts, you can streamline your efforts and see better outcomes. We’ll guide you through the strategic advantages of hiring external specialists and offer practical tips for scrutinizing your paid search campaigns. Find out why non-branded conversions matter and how reallocating your budget wisely can lead to immediate improvements. Tune in for an episode packed with actionable advice designed to elevate your marketing performance to new heights!

The Digital Horizons Podcast is hosted by:

James Walker - Managing Director Walker Hill Digital
Brian Hastings - Managing Director Nous

Speaker 1:

Audit your tracking, understand where your conversions are coming from, and then learn to trust the data that you're capturing. Then you can draw some clear conclusions on it and make informed decisions on your budgets and campaign changes going forward. Welcome to Digital Horizons. All right, we're back. I'm Brian, I've got James here. So today we're looking at five marketing mistakes to avoid.

Speaker 2:

Yes, five things that we see consistently when talking to business owners and when we deal with different businesses that they are making mistakes that you should be across so that way you can stop wasting money on your marketing, because if you're doing any of these and you stop doing them, it is going to drastically improve your performance of your digital marketing.

Speaker 1:

We're going to jump into it. These are a combination of mistakes that both James sees within his clients and past clients that I also see reflected across my clients and my experience in advertising and marketing as well. It's pretty interesting that we see the same mistakes mirrored across our industries and clients.

Speaker 2:

I'm sure this is a very consistent thing, because some of these things are not easy to get right, depending on how you're approaching it. If you're doing it yourself, you're just not going to know that. Maybe it's just stuff you're not even aware of, that you're not doing. Or if you're paying someone to do it, maybe they're just not doing as good of a job as what they should be doing in the first place, and so it's good to just be aware of this.

Speaker 1:

So about what you should try, new things you could implement. This is our first time talking about mistakes and big mistakes. I think sometimes there's a lot of quick wins to be had in focusing on what you could do better, that you're currently already doing and what you could improve. So can we jump into it? Number one it is not having any tracking in place and ignoring that data and the outcomes of any tracking that you have in place.

Speaker 2:

That's a big one, Because if you don't know what's working, how do you improve? And so many accounts when we're looking at we're doing an audit or we're looking at accounts that we're potentially going to work with, first thing is a tracking in place, because it really gets rid of all the other data that you can look at is if they're over-reporting, if they're under-reporting, if they're not reporting at all, how do you know what's working? And so how can you provide guidance on what is going to improve your results? Because if there's no tracking in place, you've got absolutely no idea what's working. And so I think this is probably the first thing you should be looking at is, if you haven't got it, make sure you've got conversion tracking in place and you're tracking only metrics that really matter to your business. You're not just tracking. You know and that they're firing correctly, you're not over-reporting, and so that way you can make strategic decisions about your advertising dollars that you're spending and also where you're going to be spending those dollars. In terms of when you're analyzing different platforms, how they're performing.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely right that example you gave. I've seen too many scenarios where we take over a campaign and the onsite tracking that the client's using to inform their decisions is how many clicks were there from one page to a contact form that was on a separate domain? There's no proof of actual outcome in that, but the last agency and the client is really focused on that as a result. So we go through an audit of every conversion being tracked, how it's tracked, whether it should be counted, and also make sure we're incorporating clicks to calls if they can be tracked. Is there dynamic phone tracking or phone tracking options that you can get up and running so you're tracking all potential conversions, not just the ones that come through on the web form? Now what about the email address? How many leads are coming directly through from the visible email address that aren't being tracked? So you can start to build a real picture for actual conversions. And that's just one part of the tracking and data and analytics that we can look at as well.

Speaker 2:

I guess, as part of this same mistake that people make is also relying too much on in platform attribution reporting. So if you're only looking at what Google's telling you, what Facebook's telling you, and you're saying, all right, cool, I'm getting a 10 rows on this, I'm getting eight rows on this, but then your sales aren't reflecting that, make sure you're actually cross-referencing all that data or what your agency's reporting to you against your actual numbers, because there's nothing worse than being told hey, you're getting $10 back for every dollar you're spending in this platform, but that doesn't align with what you're actually seeing in your bank account and what's showing in your Shopify sales data. Or at least with Google, you've got your call reporting, which gives you some pretty accurate call data because you can see the phone number and the calls, time and duration. But when it's coming to sales reporting, you want to make sure that you are getting accurate data and not over-reporting on that side of things, because each platform is going to claim it.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely. A reverse to that same issue is blaming one particular channel. Say you're only doing paid search. Say three out of every 10 inquiries come from a paid search conversion. We've had the experience before with one client that would look at all of their total inquiry lists. Say there was 100 in the month and paid search was only responsible for, say, 30 of that 100. If there was a drop in that overall 100 conversions, the only channel they're spending money in is paid search. So it would get the blame for the drop, even though paid search was up month on month in terms of the conversions it generated.

Speaker 1:

So it's using the full picture, all of the data at your disposal, to try to identify what the actual problem is. If there was a drop in overall conversions, where was that drop from? Was it from your organic? Was your brand terms slipping? But performance is still delivering Without proper tracking. And if you ignore the outcomes of that tracking, you're going to try to fix things that probably aren't broken or you're going to draw the incorrect conclusions from what your marketing data is telling you. So audit your tracking, understand where your conversions are coming from and then learn to trust the data that you're capturing. Then you can draw some clear conclusions on it and make informed decisions on your budgets and campaign changes going forward.

Speaker 2:

That's number one. And yeah, and you can't do any of that if it's not set up correctly. Make sure it's done correct, Don't let it just. Yeah, don't believe the data unless you're sure that it's correct.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely so. Number two is a lack of clear brand messaging. So this is something that's very dear to my heart, but what do we mean by lack of clear brand messaging here, james?

Speaker 2:

Well, I mean not being the branding guy in the room at the moment, but I would say that it's probably just making sure that your shit looks the same on all your different platforms. That is probably the clearest and most succinct. This is what you do, right? That's exactly what it is, and I guess it's more than just looking the same.

Speaker 1:

It's giving the same message or communication, being consistent in your reason for a client or a potential customer choosing you across different platforms. Obviously there has to be platform-specific variances. You're not going to do a fully polished TVC commercial on a TikTok campaign, but the brand delivery should be consistent across all. We see so many instances where the campaign activity that we're running looks great, it's driving traffic through to a terrible website and we're desperately in need of building up and improving the quality of the experience on the website. Also, the brand is more than just the ads or the creative and the ads that we're sending out in the campaigns.

Speaker 1:

What's the experience that? Just the ads or the creative and the ads that we're sending out in the campaigns? What's the experience that the customer has, or the prospect has after they've inquired? Is the person calling them back and trying to convert them into a customer? Or the onsite experience, the purchasing experience? Is it as good as what was promised in the ad?

Speaker 1:

So there's a lot of attributes that go into every touch point that a customer might have and when interacting with your brands, from seeing your ads all the way through to becoming a customer. So we want to get really clear on what your brand message and tone of voice is and make sure that the ads that are more brand focused and building that demand for the product delivering the same tone and feel as your conversion focused ads, as the call that they get, as the experience that they have in working with the brand going forward. That really takes a bit of an audit of every potential touch point a customer might have with your brand and making sure it's all up to a standard and it's all displaying and presenting the same brand tone of voice.

Speaker 2:

So number three we have here is spending too much time on demand capture campaigns and not enough on demand generation, and I mean I love demand capture campaigns.

Speaker 2:

That's sort of where we've lived for the last sort of five years or so, and we're starting to make that shift outside of that. So a bit of background in terms of what we're referring to here. Demand capture is when you're sitting bottom of the funnel. It's people who are in market searching for your campaigns or you're running conversion campaigns on social media. That's really focusing on the people who have shown signs that they are interested to purchase what you have to sell. So that's your demand capture.

Speaker 2:

And so making sure I mean you always want to make sure your budget's there you're capturing that. That's a low hanging fruit, but you're also competing with everybody else no-transcript awareness amongst people who aren't probably thinking about it right now. So I think that that's a big mistake, that a lot of brands and I mean something that we've shifted to over the last few years but making sure that you've got your budget and your campaign allocation split out so that you're focusing not only on bottom of funnel demand capture but lifting it up into some more video view, brand awareness, more stuff that you guys do a lot of in your space, to make sure that once all that demand and you've exhausted your budget and the allocation there for that demand capture that you can lift above it and get that demand, increase the awareness of your products so you can sell more.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I'm a huge advocate for this mistake and avoiding it. Too often it can seem like it's just your agency trying to push you into an ad objective or an ad platform that doesn't have enough attribution or doesn't have enough conversion metrics assigned to it. But you're going to stagnate if you're only ever trying to capture the small percentage of people who are ready for your product today. We need to be building interest and excitement around your brand and engagement with your brand in your potential audience's minds before they're ready for the product, so that when they are ready, when they're ready to look for it, when they're ready to search or begin that buying process, you're in the top one, two or three brands ready to go. Then it makes the demand capture process a lot cheaper. If you've already got a bit of equity or good perception of your brand built up and you mentioned in the start, the mistake is spending too much time on demand capture.

Speaker 2:

It's also spending not enough money on demand generation, exactly Not having a good split of budget allocation.

Speaker 1:

And when the going gets tough and when things are, you know campaign performance isn't quite delivering from a demand capture standpoint. The reaction shouldn't be let's just spend more money on demand capture. The process there should be. Well, we need to build more demand. We're not seeing the results we want in demand capture. Let's spread some more money across to demand generation or brand ad campaign activity so that we can build that demand again and capture more next month and the month after.

Speaker 2:

I think something that also ties into that is also killing off brand generation campaigns too early, because what's going to happen is you're going to be used to seeing your CPA of, say, you're used to a $50 CPA, and then your agency or you start going all right, well, we're just going to put some budget towards a demand generation campaign, so that might be a video views or awareness style campaign, and then you're looking at the numbers and it's like shit, I've just spent $1,000 and I've only got one conversion. And then go oh, I'm going to kill this and that's what's going to be like. Oh, you need to feed into the rest of your funnel to be able to see the positive results of that. And I think that a lot of times when you're really CPA focused and you're really looking at those raw numbers in your CAD accounts, that's going to be a mistake is turning it off too soon and not letting it run and do what it's supposed to be doing to fill up the rest of the buckets.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, you need to be making a commitment to this brand development and this demand generation campaign for three, six, nine months, even an always on approach. But further to that commitment of budget, you can't just use your performance ads and give them a demand generation or a brand campaign objective. You need to commit to good creative as well. You need creative that engages or tells a story or connects in a way deeper than the demand.

Speaker 2:

The buy my shit ads. Yeah, yeah, the buy. It's time to convert ads.

Speaker 1:

Otherwise you're just sharing the same ad and two different results or two different ad objective types. So a part of it is not just trialing it with the same ad, but it's actually giving a bit more of a commitment to developing a message and a communication on ad that will generate engagement and introduce you in a positive light. Also, what we see with the demand generation campaigns or brand campaigns is a commitment to multiple channels, whereas performance or demand capture campaigns we focus on the lowest cost per acquisition first and we try to sort of get to that threshold where every extra dollar is driving up the cost per acquisition too high. So then we move to the next best performing channel. Have a good mix of those. There may only be a few channels in that area.

Speaker 1:

When it comes to demand generation or brand campaigns, a commitment to multiple channels is beneficial, showing that we've got creative running across various platforms and actually have you be seen or introduce you to a wider ranging audience and show that you're present in more platforms rather than just hyper-focusing in on one performance campaign. So there's a lot to take on board there, but it's splitting up your budget effectively so that you are demanding future or you're building future demand to not leave your performance campaigns hanging in the future when no one's interested in your brand. They're all interested in your competitors who've done this work without you.

Speaker 2:

And it's going to be also lower your cost overall, for your cost per acquisition, because eventually what's going to happen is that your brand awareness is going to mean you're going to be converting at a higher conversion rate, which then will lower your CPAs and you're not just competing for that bottom of funnel traffic. So next we're getting into number four. One, two, three, it is four. Yeah.

Speaker 1:

All right.

Speaker 2:

Neglecting customer retention. Neglecting customer retention so this is one that I mean I'm definitely guilty of it we focus so much on and this is from a marketing point of view. I'm not talking about our internal like we've got a great customer experience team and our customers are looked after, but when we're thinking about on the marketing side of things, when we're thinking about campaigns that we're running, we're not running well. We rarely will run anything that is really focused at our current customer base and trying to increase that retention rate. And so a mistake that people have is that all their campaigns are all focused on customer acquisition and you're not running anything about customer retention.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think sell yourself a little bit short there. I think this channel is probably pretty helpful for showing that you care about the industry and you're willing to share.

Speaker 2:

I meant like pre-2024.

Speaker 1:

Pre-2024. But yeah, you're right, it's easier to show new people reached new clicks generated, new traffic converted into new clients or leads. And when we're thinking about our clients as well, it's kind of where we hand over the reins. They've converted their client. It can often be up to them to think about how they retain their clients. What we've found it's an untapped resource because if you do have a churn level of customers, typically it's going to be pretty consistent rate of churn for whatever your industry is. But if you can increase that average lifetime value by another couple of months or increase that average order value or the reorder value, whatever your product or however your service is structured, it's much easier to convert that client again or that customer again or for longer than it is to win a new client 100%.

Speaker 2:

So I guess a customer retention ad that we're about to launch and I mean, when we were actually going to launch the ad I wasn't actually thinking it as a customer retention thing, but I think it actually works and falls into this bucket is we're currently recruiting for roles, and when we are recruiting for roles, we're looking for very experienced and I want to work with the best people. So by putting that on our socials and our recruitment ad, there's like hey look, if you're in this industry looking for this role, I want you to work with us. It sort of puts us in the spotlight, where our customers and our clients are going to see these ads and go like, yeah, these guys are trying to recruit the best talent in our area. And I think just strategies like that and thinking about your ad campaigns whilst it might serve a purpose in terms of other things, think about what your clients are going to think when they're actually seeing these ads as well, because that's going to elevate your status amongst them as well.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, Other strategies in this space to not neglect your customer retention is net promoter score. If you've got a web-based service or products or retail product having that net promoter score survey pop up just out of 10, how likely are you to recommend this product to a friend, family or friend to help monitor it on a weekly basis, getting that review back from those customers to see. Are we continuing to surprise and delight and bring joy to our clients, or are we struggling to get positive reviews? What are we doing wrong? Further to the customer retention, another area we've had some success in and it's typically in the fitness space where there's a lot of clients that come in and then churn due to their life changes or for whatever reason is win-back campaigns.

Speaker 1:

So looking at all of their past members who have been a member in the last year but are no longer a member, and providing them with offers to reignite that relationship, to try to get them back.

Speaker 1:

They probably didn't leave because they hate the brand or don't want to do it anymore. They've probably had some change or lack of motivation or drop in motivation. So they know what the product is, they know what it's going to be like coming to this fitness location to this brand. So it's much easier to get them back and you're willing to give them a bit more of an offer to get them to try coming back again. So for those brands that have been around for a very long time as well, it's really helpful to look at your lapsed clients and then think well, what would I offer them if they were on the phone today to get them to come back in and automate that process with marketing automation. Have a trigger that identifies this is a lapsed client. They've crossed over to three months lapsed. This offer is automatically sent out to them and then they might get resent that offer in a week's time, for instance. We get a huge amount of customer wins from that side of things, Nice.

Speaker 2:

Now onto our fifth and final mistake that we see within digital marketing, and this is a pretty big one and it's probably going to relate to a lot of people who are watching this. But don't do it yourself if you don't know what you're doing or if your time is going to be far better spent doing what you're good at and growing your business. I think you made a comment earlier today. It was like you need some legal advice. You're not going to go and just watch some YouTube videos and do legal advice for yourself Not taking that away from anybody who's watching this, because the whole goal is to teach people how to do digital marketing and provide advice here. But if your time is better spent on other areas of your business, it's probably not going to be a good use of your time trying to do it yourself and probably getting average results, when you could engage someone who has a lot of experience and has worked with businesses like yourself and can get the results that you're after.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's really about understanding and knowing your limits. You might have strategies that you want to put in place just because you, the marketer or the business owner in this position can't physically get there and implement the campaigns or launch this automation. That doesn't mean you've failed. You don't have to know how to do every single specialty within this marketing remit and, of course, we're going to be advocates of using specialists and people who know what they're doing. But it will save you money. It'll save you in mistakes, time lost, test budget because we know what will work quickly. And too often do we see that marketing specializations and skills are kind of undervalued and there's that view that, oh, you can just do that yourself, and a lot of businesses put that expectation unfairly onto an individual marketing manager to do just about everything they expect to design the ads, run the campaign, set up the tracking and analytics, do the reports create all the content analytics.

Speaker 1:

Do the reports create all the content? It is not possible and it's very reasonable for you to make recommendations to your team or your company that in the right instances we want to bring our strategy to life by bringing on the right marketing partners or specialists that can help us get to our goals sooner and potentially save a lot of time and budget in getting it wrong along the way.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and I think also that the first thing that happens when you get busy is you stop doing it and then your leads stop coming in. And then you're like, oh shit, it's been a few months I haven't spent any time on the marketing because I got busy. And then you need to start doing it again and it turns into a cycle. I mean, I've done this in the past where you've really focused and you're thinking, yeah, I'm going to spend all this time, I'm going to be posting on social media, I'm going to be creating content, I'm going to be doing this stuff. You get busy and you stop doing it because of the result of what you've been doing, and then you have to go back and do it again after, and then you have a quiet period again. So I think that, just for the sake of consistency, having someone dedicated to being created or make sure your marketing is staying consistent, is really key to succeeding within your business.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I agree, and there are areas where a handover stage or a process where you might engage an agency like Nowse, for instance, to help develop a marketing automation strategy. That doesn't necessarily mean you're paired or tied to Nowse forever to operate at that same level. Maybe it's a implementation of the strategy is a heavy involvement for the first few months, and then we hand over that effort back to your internal resource as you get more confident and comfortable with the platform and then we scale down to a maintenance and support level. Not everything has to be external and forever, but if you're getting something complex up and running, like a marketing automation strategy in a tool you're unfamiliar with, why not go to an expert and get it sorted quickly? You're spending a lot of money on this platform and you need to get some results out of it, so go to someone who's done it before, leverage their experience. You're going to pay for it, of course, but alternatively, you're going to try to hire someone internally who says they know what they're doing.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, the cost per month on that person. And then what? If you know where's their oversight? How do you know that they're doing a good enough job if you don't know how to judge quality work in that specialization? We see that a lot in paid search campaign management. Someone comes in says that, yeah, I can, I know Google and I've done it before. And then they take our beautifully structured campaigns and have their way with them.

Speaker 2:

That's it. I mean, the cost isn't just your money, it's not just your time, it's also the lost opportunity of every dollar every week that you're not having your campaigns running as effectively as they can be is potentially lost business for your business, the lost business for your business. And so I think that when you're looking at digital marketing or marketing or branding or anything for your business, it's always best to pay people who know what they're doing to get the results you're after, so you can focus on growing your business in what your specialization is.

Speaker 1:

I've just thought while you were talking there, james, on a last bonus round mistake that I often see and it's in just about every performance campaign that is brought to us to review or look at from another agency is the amount of conversions that are claimed by that agency that are actually brand searches, and how much budget is being allocated to brand campaigns and how much focus there is on conversions within those paid campaigns that you are probably going to get anyway through your organic brand search results. So that might be another mistake you might be unaware of. That you're making right now is your agency's coming back and saying look at all these brand conversions that we've, look at all these conversions we've generated for you. One question to ask would be how many of those were we going to get anyway as a result of our brand power and how many were non-branded conversions?

Speaker 2:

A big, I guess, tell for the reports that these come up on is if it doesn't have a list of keywords that generated your conversions. Every time we see them, you've got a report and it just says, hey, you've had 20 conversions and there's no list as to what has triggered that conversion. Nine times out of 10, it's going to be your branded term and it's always hidden in the reports, and so I think that's definitely a win. You can do right now. If you are running Google Ads yourself or you're paying an agency, check your report. How much are you spending on brand? Check out the auctions insight report. Is anyone even bidding on your brand? If not, turn it off. There's some money saved immediately.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, amazing. Nice little quick win at the end there. So thanks for listening today. Yeah, and that's the podcast for this week. Thanks, cheers.