In this week’s episode of the Engaging Marketeer, I want to talk about something that doesn’t often get mentioned in marketing, particularly digital marketing, and that’s when should you NOT do digital marketing.
I had a conversation earlier on today with somebody at a networking meeting I was at about how we do digital marketing at Engage Web and how we help businesses. He specifically asked me “do you do email marketing?” and I had to go into the whole explanation that yes, we do email marketing as a service, but what’s important to think about is that it’s not always right for you. A lot of companies come to us and say “can you do Facebook Ads?” or “can you do Google Ads?”, but just because it’s something that you can do, doesn’t mean that you necessarily should.
The reason I mention that is because a lot of businesses try things like search engine optimization (SEO) or Google Ads or Facebook Ads because it’s something that they’ve read about. But they’ve not actually understood why they’re doing it and the reason you do any of these. The reason is either to increase the number of sales that you’re getting, or to increase the number of leAds and contacts on your database. If you don’t get either of those two results with whatever marketing activity you choose to do, it’s failed. I am seeing far too many people, far too many business owners, far too many website owners saying “I tried Facebook Ads” or “I tried Google Ads” or “I tried email marketing and it just didn’t work”. Most of the time, the fact is that they are promoting a website that is, what’s the polite way of saying this, S**T. It just doesn’t work. They’re basically marketing something that is crap, that will not convert, that is absolute homemade garbage, and that Facebook Ads or Google Ads or email marketing will be some magic bullet that’s going to make everything okay.
Why waste your money investing in paid media when what you really need to be doing is sorting out the website so that it converts right from the get-go? This may sound obvious it but again at a networking meeting today, I had a conversation with somebody, a very brief exchange, about conversion rates on a website. He said ‘oh, I couldn’t afford your services’ and I sort of joked ‘well, can you afford not to really?’ and he went on to say very quickly that I don’t get anything through my website right now and I don’t want one of your websites the £99 a month website because you don’t own that, do you? Well, no, our website package that we do is a lease website. No, you don’t own it, but you do own the content, the data, the sales and the leads, it’s just the design that you don’t own. Why pay all that money upfront for a website when it’s not going to work?
I learned this message and it sounds obvious but it really isn’t. Many people don’t seem to understand it. I learned this back in 2000, I think, as the online marketing manager for GAME. The designer of our new website said ‘there’s no point marketing this website yet until we’ve got it in a stage that it’s going to work properly’. You don’t shout about something until it’s ready to be shouted about. I thought that was very sensible, because if the website’s got errors on and it’s not converting, then yes, why would we promote it? Why would we spend lots of money advertising it?
Too many people today don’t spend the money on the website. They get the website done on the cheap, maybe it’s a friend or a relative, or it’s a Wix website. So when should you not use digital marketing for your business? When your website doesn’t convert in the first place. Please don’t fall into that mistake, please don’t do that. Don’t try to do paid Ads, don’t approach a digital marketing agency because a lot of them are not as ethical as we are. A lot of them will say yes and they’ll take money off you and they will start doing it for you and you will not get the results and you will think that it doesn’t work, when in reality it’s your website that doesn’t work.
I hope it’s not been too doom and gloom for you. I appreciate it’s a bit of a dour one, but if you did enjoy it, then please give us a subscribe on whatever platform you happen to be listing on today, give a rating if you could, I’d really appreciate that. I will catch you on the next podcast.
