Digital marketing isn’t a science, no matter what some may tell you. There are no guarantees, no matter how many campaigns you’ve run. That’s especially true when it comes to B2B digital marketing. Yes, you learn from previous campaigns, and success can get easier. But very few campaigns launch perfectly. There is almost always some level of testing and tweaking to optimize performance.
But if after all that your marketing efforts are still failing, there are some broad reasons that could be happening. We’ve already covered a few of them.
Take heart, though. There’s one more thing you might be doing wrong if your digital marketing isn’t delivering the kinds of results you’re expecting.
You’re relying too much on one channel.
Digital marketing is a symphony; it’s not a solo. You can build out the world’s best email nurturing campaign, but if that’s all you’re doing, you’re limiting your success. You can have a fully engaged social media strategy that is building your audience, but if that’s the only place you interact with them, then you’re missing prime opportunities.
The problem is that so much of modern marketing is planned and executed in silos. Those silos are limiting your results.
As Idea Grove’s director of content marketing, I believe in the power of a great content piece to drive leads into your funnel. What I don’t believe is that content is some kind of magic beacon your ideal prospect will see shining brighter than all the others and somehow find that ebook or infographic or video or blog post.
Content working together with social media, though, to get eyes on it is better. Add to that digital advertising targeted to a very specific audience is better still. But as coordinated as that feels, it’s still too limiting.
What about those visitors who came to the site but didn’t download? How do we account for them? How do we get them back to your site? Or, how do we get people to your site at all?
Integrate your marketing and PR to take full advantage of both
The answer is to stop this siloed thinking. Nothing we do works in isolation. One piece, standing alone, can’t work without the others. Start thinking about public relations, marketing and all that comes with them as integrated pieces of the same whole. Do this and you’re setting yourself up for sustained success.
Public relations: The goal of public relations is visibility for your business and for your leaders. Why do you want visibility? To get people to seek you out, to go to your site, to interact with your brand in some way. That’s the goal of marketing, too, and putting PR at the front of the marketing engine as a way to drive traffic to your site—and into your funnel—makes it much easier to market to them later.
PR also has benefits to SEO. By getting your business mentions on outside sites and the back links that come with them, you give your site more authority, and authority is one of the key factors in site rankings.
Digital marketing: The PR has worked, and traffic to your site is up. Now, by using marketing automation tools that allow you to track who has come to your site, you can follow those visitors and target them with advertising to get them to return.
But what about those people who didn’t see that byline your PR team got placed or who didn’t read your quotes in that interview? Digital advertising—both pay-per-click ads and social media ads—targeted at the right people can drive that traffic to a landing page on your site, which then encourages them to download that great content piece I mentioned earlier. And what if they don’t? Then we turn to our other tools.
We send them retargeting ads that point them to the content. Or we try another piece of content if the initial piece didn’t attract them. The point is that because your prospects are all different, no one channel working in isolation will attract them. And if you continue taking a siloed approach, you’re missing out on a lot of potential buyers.
Is this integrated approach complicated? It can be if you’re unfamiliar with all the tools. But when you see how all of the pieces play together, and when you start thinking about digital marketing as an ongoing effort and not something siloed in single-channel campaigns, you can start to see real success.