James Rix, CEO of Crowdify Global argues how in marketers’ quest for amazing creativity to build brand awareness and reach, the technical part of the puzzle that sits behind all of this can get overlooked along the way.
Client walks into a bar. Ouch. Client walks into a meeting with any potential marketing agency partner and they will get this amazing creative marketing spiel about the power of branding and vision. Yes, the creative bit (the art) is essential to building brand awareness, reach and driving traffic to a website – but what happens when they land on your website? Too often than not, the technical part of the puzzle (the science) that sits behind all of this can get lost along the way… and it could be costing you valuable customers.
You can drive one million hits and get one conversion. But why isn’t your website converting? Why are you losing traffic on this page? Why are people not filling out the contact form? The analytics part of the equation; all the unsexy data stuff and the social media/traffic source tracking that goes on behind the scenes gets pushed to one side in marketers’ quest to have that super amazing creative. Implementing the analytics early on in your marketing journey will be the difference between a traffic driver and a sales conversion.
Let’s say you have a £10K budget for paid social. Bob, for example, is a paid ads person working for one of these marketing agencies and he specialises in Facebook, so naturally he says, let’s put it all on Facebook Ads. Let’s say you get a £1 click through rate – is that good or bad? What are you comparing it to – competitors? Other platforms? What is good and what is bad?
Wouldn’t it make more sense to take £5K of it, spread it across Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat and TikTok, see which platforms are working best, then take the other £5K and Bob’s your uncle – it will be the best money you’ve spent because you have a much better understanding of how every platform is working for you. If you’re only running ads on one channel, you can have coincidences; it just so happens that your ads are really expensive that one week. Whereas, when you can look at multiple channel spending and see that all your channels are costing you 4x as much, then you are in a position to make an educated decision to stop spending that money and wasting it too soon.
Look at Google, look at Facebook, look at how your Instagram ads are performing. This will, of course, vary depending on what industry sector your business is in and which customers you are trying to engage with – but the work needs to start there. Contrary to popular belief, ads don’t just work by themselves. You have to go into this expecting to experiment.
You can have the best marketing in the world but if your ads are not placed in the right place on the supermarket shelf, the Kit-Kats just won’t sell. Bringing that into the digital world, you’ve got to have that creative thinker and the beautiful website that can attract those customers. All of those things are absolute common sense. But they are not good enough on their own. There are a lot of people out there who have great ideas and great brands but actually what breaks the back of these things in this day and age is the technical knowledge and visualisation – being able to see what’s going on with your products and services to be able to make smart, informed decisions that will drive your business forward.
By James Rix
CEO
Crowdify Global