Truth Bomb: There is More to Marketing Than Just Ads if You Want Success

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Marketing is embedded in everything that you do. When market tactics don’t work it’s usually the result of operational issues.

I once worked with a client who was spending $10,000 per month on online ads and had been for almost a year with zero returns. There are a few key issues that determine the success of online ads. When we investigated what was going on with this client, here is what we found.


Organic SEO Matters When Running Ads

First, the website was not optimized for SEO. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process of improving your website to increase its findability and visibility when people search for products or services related to your business. Regardless of what search engine you use, and yes social media platforms are search engines too, your site must be built and updated in a way that search engines can find and categorize your site correctly.

An analogy I use when I’m working with clients is an algorithm is a complicated mathematical equation that no normal person is intended to understand. Algorithms are used to sort and categorize the content. Tech only understands zeros and ones. Absolutely everything you do on a digital device is translated into zeros and ones. This means that tech is black and white in how it interprets content, images, video, and code. You need to do certain things, so your business is categorized correctly.

People on the other hand are multi-dimensional. They can see your microfacial expressions, hear tones in your voice, watch for body language, and get a vibe about you. All of this is done subconsciously. Combine that with the words that you say and you create multiple possibilities for connection, communication, and mutual understanding.

Algorithms don’t understand “well I meant this…”.


Building a Targeted and Relevant List Matters

The second issue this company was facing is they had no landing pages and no way to capture contact information or convert visitors. It was assumed that a user would stay on the site and navigate it until they found what they were looking for.

Did you know? The average user stays on a website for 15 seconds. And that’s assuming that everything loaded within two seconds. That is not a lot of time and why it is so important that your site is optimized.

The third issue was that the CRM was not connected to the site. So even if contact information was captured, there was no way to get that information to the sales team and no follow-up email campaigns to nurture leads.


It’s Not About You, It’s About Them

The fourth issue was that the company only talked about its expertise. The services were vague at best which left viewers thinking “you’re a great resource, but you don’t offer any services.” The services needed to be repackaged in a way that made it easy for a prospective client to say, “tell me more” or even better “let’s get started.

Companies, much to their dismay, often use the terms marketing and advertising interchangeably. Let’s be clear, advertising and marketing are not the same thing! An advertising campaign is a part of a marketing strategy.

There was a time when advertising was used by companies as an outreach, a method of communication to tell people what to say and believe about a product or company. It was the only one-way communication tool that companies had with customers. They would advertise in good times to flaunt their success and in bad times to prove they were still around and surviving. Times have changed! People and technology have changed drastically since then. In today’s busy world with so many distractions competing for our attention, getting the attention of your ideal client needs to be intentional and you need to be set up correctly to support that.

Today, it is known what an ad is. People know when a company pays to put their message online, on a billboard, in a podcast, in a magazine, or anywhere else an ad can be placed. They also know that the message is the company’s words—or what they say. Marketing on the other hand is what the company does. There is a big distinction between the two and this distinction drives drastically different results. Just because a company calls its advertising, marketing doesn’t make it so. Marketing is the actions and reactions that demonstrate how a company takes responsibility for its business, its employees, customers, the community, and the industry.  

Ok, I’m stepping off my soapbox and back to this client’s situation.


Just Give Me the Results

The tactic that this company was doing was online advertising and it wasn’t working. The reason it wasn’t working had nothing to do with the ad platform, it was because they didn’t have the correct operations, technology, or strategy in place to support the tactic intended to generate results.

It’s like when you go to the doctor. You tell the doctor the symptoms that you are having and it’s her job to diagnose the disease. You then have a choice; would you rather treat the symptoms which could cause side effects or treat the disease and get better?

When you are only focused on tactics, you’re simply treating the symptoms and not the disease which means that over time, the symptoms will get worse, and the tactics will stop working. At this point, you can choose another medication (another marketing professional) and hope for different results, but ultimately, until you fix the actual problem, you will stay in this same situation generating the same results, and you’ll continue to plateau.

After fixing all of these issues, restructuring the offerings to make it clear how they could help their target audience, and developing a strategy that supported company goals, we were able to organically get them on page one of the search results and eventually online sales because their largest source of income.

Download our free eBook, Hidden Truth About Why Your Marketing Doesn’t Work to learn more.

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