The real reason your digital marketing is not working

We’ve been through a dramatic period of upheaval and change across all areas of business over the past decade, and marketing is no different.

The digital revolution means many of us are working in jobs and businesses that simply didn’t exist as recently as just five years ago, and we’ve all had to adapt our business models to survive.

In 2016 we saw the solidification of social media marketing as the new norm when trying to reach our valued customers online, who had apparently turned away from more traditional broadcast media channels.

In 2017 we were all getting our marketing heads around how to best engage with our audience across multiple channels, using video, graphics, real time streaming and a long list of other mobile and content lead tactics.

Now here we are in mid-2018, and most of us have successfully made the switch to a digitally-focused marketing approach with social media at its core… or have we?

These days, if a campaign or a content piece is not working, then our first reaction (and our clients’) is often to fall back on increasing our paid media spend so that we can achieve higher levels of engagement and meet our content goals.

But is this approach really working? Or have we all simply fallen back into our traditional broadcasting mindset and reverted back to the methods that used to work when the majority of our marketing was still above the line?

It’s true that the digital revolution has changed the marketing landscape in some very dramatic ways and in a very short period of time. It’s also true that this level of change will continue for the foreseeable future.

That said if your paid content and social media marketing campaigns are not working then maybe the answer is to ask why, rather than simply increasing your paid media spend until you reach the desired traffic and engagement.

Despite all the change, one thing will always be constant is the need to understand your customer and their needs first.

If you’re not organically working your social media channels on a daily basis, not engaging within comment feeds, not re-shaping and re-posting content for different audiences, not testing different headlines or pushing content through employee advocacy networks, then really you’re simply doing traditional push marketing and media the same way it has always been done.

That’s fine, just don’t expect to truly succeed in digital marketing if your default setting is to see a lack of engagement as a need to increase budgets.