Consider Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Recently, I became a member of a bit of a sales/business/marketing network which seeks to coach and train small business owners on how to catapult themselves into another level of success. The sales training aspect, more than anything, has been exceptional. Mostly skill set and tactics, with a little bit of motivation and encouragement.

However, the membership group has its own Facebook page as well. When I first signed up, I was hesitant to join the page. I felt it was a bunch of high end car dealerships, realtors, insurance & corporate sales, even some sharks like timeshare & gym memberships with high quotas & tight deadlines. But I was curious to enter such world, and my goals need to get bigger with this.

What I found however, was quite different. I’m sure the ‘shark’ salespeople are still out there, but spend less time (no time) on the page. They’ve done the training, went to the seminar, read the book, and making use of it. What’s lingering, is sorta like stinky fish. I see alot of quasi-website builders offering cheap website design using cookie cutter template builders you’d find at your larger web hosting companies, but those are ok. What gets me, are the people and businesses who can’t even achieve that, so they move to the next lowest common denominator. Social Media. Offering services such as “Building your Facebook business page” and “Social media advertising”.

Who’s Running Your Campaign

My concerns are twofold. First, if the only service they have available is Facebook business page building and advertising, they’re probably not all that experienced. As generally there’s not enough ad spend share to make a living purely on Facebook ads off most small businesses.  Typically, an agency might charge 15-20% of the ad spend for maintenance costs, although possibly charge a setup fee. Still, among small businesses with likely no website, and no previous ad spend on social media, how much is a typically small business owner going to entrust some rando on the internet? $100. So one would earn $20, maybe $25 from each client. Not bad money necessarily, however what previous experience do they have in targeting and deciding upon audience demographics (geo, interest, age) as well as ad copy to make it interesting, well ‘liked’ or ‘share’able?

However, the second part of my concern is that, digital marketing is soo much more than Facebook ads. If you plan on just handing your money over, having someone dump your money in to 1 campaign like its a dump truck, and say ‘Well, here it is. Your campaign ended. Lets look at the results.” you’re totally wasting a large part of your ROI and ads effectiveness. There’s just so much more which goes into a proper ad campaign its voluminous.

What Makes A Good Campaign Strategy

Starting with intentions. What are your intentions for this campaign, and ‘Brand Awareness’ isn’t a proper answer to get because that isn’t measurable. One cannot measure how aware people are of you or your company. Are you looking for a certain number of page likes, likes or shares of the ad itself (a viral ad), or is it phone calls. Leads, inquiries, contact form submissions. Secondly, one really needs to use Analytics & data to dig deeper into an ad campaign. Sure you might be getting page clicks, but are the users doing anything. Does the ad relate to what the business does. For instance, let’s say a general contractor is looking to push their new skill set of hardwood flooring. They run an ad “We Do Hardwood Flooring. Click Here To Learn More!” and it leads directly to your home page, and you get 300 website clicks. Well, that’s actually quite impressive, a pretty good ad for such terrible copy. However, what happens after this point, after the click? Did they call, did they browse the site, look at your photos or rates.

What if, lets say, the ad click takes them to the home page of your website, and there’s no mention of hardwood flooring. No pictures of it, no pages. Nothing. Chances are, they will click on the ad, be taken to your website, see no images or reference to hardwood floors, and leave. That insight can only be provided by an agency doing a full digital marketing campaign. One that is certified in Adwords & Analytics, with experience in using a variety of online advertising methods including Adwords, Remarketing, Youtube & Facebook.

If I told you I am capable of running such a campaign, and was experienced in doing so, would you consider me?