Veracity Blog

Am I wasting my money on digital marketing efforts?

Am I wasting my money on digital marketing efforts?

There’s a famous saying about shouting into the void which I suspect a lot of marketers ask themselves about their digital marketing efforts.

But discovering whether we are just doing one of all those other phrases which highlight the difficulties of tracking whether all the time and money we spend on our marketing is a vital piece of the puzzle.

Most articles talking about advertising will, at one point or another, mention the famous quote from the architect of ‘modern marketing’,  John Wanamaker: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

In it, he noted that, “in programmatic advertising somewhere between 40% and 70% of advertising spend goes into the pockets of the middlemen and the Martech stack rather than the front line ad itself.”

Veracity’s own investigations showed that up to 50% of all clicks on links were non-human – even if you paid for them. 

Back in 2017 Procter & Gamble chief brand officer Marc Pritchard, who held the strings to the conglomerate’s $2.4 billion annual US advertising purse, threatened to yank his company’s spend if digital advertisers failed to address the growing mess of issues like fraud, brand safety and transparency.

In an article on Forbes in 2017 it was reported that more than $62 billion was being lost annually to poor customer service in the USA alone. 

poor customer service can affect our digital marketing efforts
SOURCE: Business Wire

The findings were reflected in a study from SuperOffice which showed that there was a serious disconnect between how well companies thought they were performing, versus how their customers saw things: “While 80% of businesses believe they provide excellent customer service, in fact only 8% of customers believe they are actually receiving excellent service.”

So Why Spend Money On Advertising?

Because potential customers are out there looking for help or for a specific product or service and you need to reach them.

Seven out of 10 consumers in a US-based survey from American Express said they’ve spent more money to do business with a company that delivers great service. 

Your digital marketing campaign needs to focus on addressing the pain/problem points your potential customers want to solve. This involves finding the right keywords or phrases which are coming up in the search engine box.

Once you’ve found what they’re searching for, you then need to show you understand their pain/problem and demonstrate that you can help them with it and what they need to do to solve it.

According to Help Scout, “70% of buying experiences are based on how the customer feels they are being treated.”

Digital marketing can help your business focus on the buyer experience and customer journey, making the process as painless as possible.

Relationship Marketing

Building your brand reputation is a form of relationship marketing, digital advertising and social media activities all help drive customer loyalties. Having a good relationship marketing strategy means you need a solid foundation in building customer retention, long-term engagement with your client base and a sense of loyalty from people who support your brand or business.

This can lead to greater benefits, including the “Holy Grail” of advertising – word-of-mouth recommendations.

According to a study by Robin Buchanan and Crawford Gillies, the increased profitability associated with relationship marketing is the result of several factors:

  • There’s less dating around. Loyal customers don’t go shopping around and they’re far less to switch. As an added bonus, they’re less price-sensitive because they’re more focused on the value than price.
  • It’s the foundation of word of mouth. Strong relationships are essential to a high Net Promoter Score — the chance that a customer will happily refer your business to a friend.
  • Your regulars are your rock. Returning customers buy more and buy more often. They’re often less expensive to serve because of their familiarity with your business and how your product works.
  • Expansion becomes easier. Long-standing customers are much more likely to purchase ancillary products through upselling and cross-selling.
  • You reduce the cost of acquisition. Happy customers introduce you to new prospects, reducing the need for paid advertising and costly marketing campaigns.

“Always keep in mind the old retail adage: Customers remember the service a lot longer than they remember the price,” Lauren Freedman, President of the E-tailing Group.

Do Your Research First

Do you know which specific companies or individuals are looking to buy your product or use your services? It would make life so much simpler if your sales teams could go straight to the client, wouldn’t it?

Buyer personas are one way to discover this.  Similar information is available for business-to-business data too.

Companies like Aberdeen offer solutions for B2B purchase intent data which captures online buyer behaviour and tracks specific company’s research levels regarding specific product/solutions.

Know Your Own Marketing Data

You must know your own data on how your marketing campaigns work. Without this knowledge, you can’t possibly be in a position to advise your clients on where they spend their marketing budget.

Here at Veracity we know all about this because we started as a digital marketing agency. We were frustrated at trying to find accurate data about how marketing campaigns we were running for our clients were performing.

We know all about having to justify the marketing budget and making sure that the money was being spent in beneficial ways which were bringing business for our clients.

That’s why we created the Veracity App. It allows you to cut through the noise and find the data which means something – visitor journeys from post to website and through the conversion funnel.

Digital Campaign Intelligence

Veracity’s digital campaign intelligence lets you see in real time how your marketing and social media efforts are working – or not – and gives you the ability to cut through vanity metrics and get to solid data.

You can discover your true cost per visit and see which channel is driving the most engaged traffic to your website, as well as identifying bots and other fraudulent clicks. With this information, you can far more easily and honestly report back to your clients.

As Emma Blunt, Director at Recognition Creative says: “Whilst I can do everything that Veracity does over time with different pieces of software, Veracity brings all that knowledge together in one place so I can see instantly how our lead generation campaigns are working.”

Emma uses Veracity for the work her agency does with SETsquared, for marketing campaigns and for monitoring how each channel performs. 

As she says: “When it comes to marketing, many people have experience and preferences and therefore will have natural bias towards certain platforms. With evidence from the Veracity Platform I can show for example that yes, Twitter’s a great awareness platform, but it’s not the one that’s generating their leads.”

She adds: “I can use Veracity to prove that it’s down to integrated marketing campaigns and show them why that works. It gives me an armoury of useful evidence to show using Veracity.”

Her thoughts are echoed by Sean Ridley, Digital Marketing Coordinator at The Linx International Group

“Google Analytics shows what happens on the website as a whole, Veracity shows what is happening for Campaign traffic. It is a mistake to think that Google Analytics does everything.

Especially when running social campaigns, using Veracity is a boon, as whilst you could get data about social from Google Analytics, you have to set lots of things up just to see data from one tweet, for example, with Veracity it just happens out of the box. 

Veracity helps me make sense of all my campaign data. Google Analytics doesn’t.”

Is it time you learnt whether you’re wasting money on digital marketing? Talk to us to see how Veracity can help you ensure you’re making the most of your efforts and you’re not just shouting into the void.

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