This dichotomy of approach often leads to expectations that negatively influence the development of online activities in various ways: from reading the wrong indicators to a series of stops and starts that cause serious problems in the development of activities.
I have contributed directly to the development of more than a hundred projects . Fortunately, most of them have been successful, but obviously there have been failures over the years.
What does it mean when a digital marketing project fails?
To give a clear definition of what I mean by “failure” let’s start from the meaning of the words.
We want to understand the word “marketing” in its broadest sense as “the art of modifying people’s behavior”: people themselves perform certain actions driven by specific awareness and marketing activities serve to modify their beliefs to influence their behavior. It can be a change of habit or in most cases the purchase of a good or service.
So we can say that a project fails when digital marketing activities do not contribute to an effective change in behavior of our customers .
This specification is fundamental because very often communication is confused with marketing: but while the first is mechanical, the second is not.
I speak of mechanics because today communicating with a specific target has become an extremely codified process. It is enough to define the best media where you can segment your target:
LinkedIn if you segment by profession
Facebook or Instagram if you segment based on passion and interests
Google based on needs
You enter your credit card on the chosen platform and based on the budget you set, a certain number of users will come into contact with the ad. Easy, right?
Making sure that this communication stimulates an actual action by the user is another matter entirely.
A digital marketing project fails when in the medium-long term it does not produce any impact on people's actual behavior.
What are the main causes?
Over the years we have noticed more and more how many of the causes are similar and repeat themselves.
The surprising detail is that none of these have anything to do directly with digital channels!
Let's see here the 6 main causes we found:
2. The problem is often inside, not outside
This is one of the issues that has always struck me because of its recurrence.
Doing digital marketing in the B2B world requires a deep alignment between marketing and sales: marketing generates demand and sales satisfies it . This balance is not easy to bring into the company and sees lead france whatsapp number data 5 million management as the key moment of misalignment.
If I had a euro for every time I heard the phrase "we pass the leads but then we don't know what happens" I would be writing this article from a Caribbean beach. Very often departments that have worked in parallel for years now find themselves having to work closely with shared metrics and indicators . For those who want to delve deeper into the topic of lead management I recommend this article Successful lead management: how it's really done .
2. Who are your buyers really?
The first step in any B2B digital marketing project is to sit down and define precisely how the purchasing process takes place and who the buyer personas are : how many are there? How do they work together? What goals do they have? Clearly defining what your buyers' problems are and how you help them solve them is essential.
Believe me when I tell you that although it seems like an absolutely obvious topic, I have rarely found unanimity within the company in defining buyers. In many cases, the attention is always on your product or service and very little is dedicated to understanding the actual impact that this has on the people to whom we sell it . If the answer is not so clear in your experience, then digital can serve as a powerful testing tool to quickly understand how everyone responds to your stimuli. But you certainly should not expect an immediate return.
3. Double somersaults are prohibited
The Italian B2B market is extraordinary! I am constantly in contact with wonderful companies that have an always active Research and Development office and are continuously launching new, innovative solutions ready to respond to the needs of the market. Be careful though, if you approach a new channel, such as online, with a new product that has not yet been commercially tested, the risk is to confuse the data and not understand whether the problem is in the product or the channel.
This is one of the few cases in which the company's reputation plays against you : it often happens that the company's customers trust it so much that they are willing to buy other products from the same company based more on trust than on actual need. Approaching a customer who doesn't know you is a completely different story. It's better to start with commercially tested products in order to validate one phenomenon at a time .
