One of the most commonly cited benefits of digital marketing is that it’s more efficient and cost-effective than offline marketing. In a well-executed campaign, these attributes hold true. However, it’s just as common for marketers to waste their opportunity to generate digital marketing ROI, and your digital marketing agency may be doing just that. There are many ways to do digital wrong, and they all revolve around the failure to drive revenue. Heed these words and make sure your agency isn’t making these mistakes.

Inability to Measure ROI

The most criminal of all offenses in digital marketing is any company’s inability to clearly show their digital marketing ROI. It’s so egregious because digital marketing makes this so easy. It allows you to easily see exactly where a customer came from. For example, if a customer clicks on one of your promoted posts and makes a purchase, you should be able to tell that customer’s purchase came as a direct result of your digital marketing efforts.

Without the tracking of revenue against investment, digital marketing is essentially useless. While you could argue that any business is nice, how can you tell if your digital marketing is working if you can’t tell exactly what your online marketing has brought you? Furthermore, how can you determine where you can improve? Trackability and accountability are musts for any digital marketing endeavor.

False Social Media Positives

Everyone knows that social media is the wave of the future in digital marketing. But there’s a difference between a popular social media page and one that’s effective. That is to say, there’s more to social media than a high follower count and lots of likes on all of your posts.

The true purpose of a social media page is to draw traffic to your company’s website, where you can sell leads on your product offerings. If people aren’t clicking through to your site, then your site isn’t doing its job, regardless of how many people your posts might engage.

Now, sharing is an important part of social media, and a lot of shares generally means that people find your content compelling and want to get others in on the action. If people share your posts, that means you’re on the right track. But again, without verifiable leads that came through social media and followed a call to action on your website, your social media isn’t really doing anything besides giving you false hope.

Lack of Lead Generation and Conversion

Inbound marketing, and digital marketing in general, is all about generating a steady stream of motivated leads. The main goal of your digital marketing is to nurture leads along the buyer’s journey, moving them along from curiosity to engagement to eventual purchase. And just as social media can fail in this area, so too can emails, blogs and every other piece of the digital marketing puzzle.

That’s why trackability is so important. You have to know how many leads each of your digital marketing pieces generates. Without this information, it’s impossible to tell what works and what doesn’t. The difference between a lead and a lurker may be something as simple as an ineffective form on your website. If you can’t connect the dots between a given landing page and its lack of response, though, you’ll never figure out why you’re not generating leads.

Bottom Line

The advantages offered by digital marketing are completely worthless if your digital marketing doesn’t utilize them to their fullest. All of your marketing should be trackable, it should be geared towards shareability and generating website traffic, and it ultimately should focus on getting leads to take the next step in the buyer’s journey. Deviating from these methodologies will severely impact your digital marketing ROI, provided you can even measure it. An inbound focus means you’ll always know what you’re getting out of your marketing, enabling you to focus on making your digital marketing the best it can possibly be.