3 Hurdles To Digital Marketing Success And How To Overcome Them

There is a tremendous disconnect between digital marketing and the general public. Most marketers are still in middle-school when it comes to digital marketing maturity and most target audiences are hitting their freshman year in college where the norm is urbane, high tech, integrated cross-channel marketing that is directed with personalized precision.

There are three mega barriers that often stop entrepreneurs as well as startups and small to midsize businesses from hurtling across those digital marketing barriers with flying success and guess what…

None of them are technical.

No Model for Change

Or rather, lack of foresight and ingenuity to seek a model for change. Don’t try to forge new territory; if you’re new to digital marketing, model your processes after those who have gone before you and succeeded. Take a proven approach and seek out vendors and agencies that have already reached the destination you’re after.

Begin with your business objectives and identify the marketing strategies you will have to execute to achieve them. After that, dial it down to the digital marketing criteria and technology you’ll need to give you the capabilities you have to have to get where you want to be.

Limited Funds

Most startups, and even some who’ve been on track for a while, face budget restrictions so, this one is a pretty easy one to understand. When money is tight, it’s easy to justify not allocating dollars to the marketing budget, especially when you can’t quite put your finger on how your bottom line will be impacted.

By the way, experts say you should allocate 20% of your projected profit margin.

But, I digress. The secret is to optimize your limited budget; in other words, make the most of what you’ve got. Stay away from big, splashy, expensive one-time marketing campaigns and spread the wealth among multi-channel marketing efforts to get optimal results. Use the heck out of social media; done right, it can be extremely low budget.

Often when long term goals are unclear the focus short-term gains becomes overly heavy and distorts the focus on improved digital marketing because it (digital marketing) loses priority.

Once goals are set and business objectives defined you can ease the pressure (regardless of how much that is about perception rather than reality) by creating credibility with some “quick and dirty” gratification by identifying which campaigns have the highest impact and utilizing them as leverage to improve others. The satisfaction will bolster moral to fuel you through the tougher gains.

Resource Restrictions

Many new businesses don’t have all the resources needed to get everything done that needs to be done; nonetheless, you’ve got to just do something. Focus on what is most critical to succeed and start chipping away a bit at a time.

Identify your star performing campaigns and strategies and focus on those that win; repeat and leverage those winners by, for example, taking a high performing webinar topic and turning it into an e-book.

Finally, focus on upselling and cross selling, as well as retaining, those customers you’ve succeeded in converting. Studies show that there is a significantly higher ROI from existing customers than from new customer acquisition.