Today digital often seems like the easy way to expand a company’s prospect and lead pool. After all, it takes just minutes to set up an ad account on Google or Facebook. Then you’re good to go, right? Not necessarily. In reality, it’s not as easy as many people think.

Marketers are often under intense pressure to get campaigns to work without adequate leadership support or understanding as to how to successfully test digital channels. Others hire agencies without clear knowledge of the strategies and tactics required to drive success and therefore have difficulty holding their agencies accountable.

When I am asked to perform a marketing audit or when I start working with a team that is uncertain of what works, I sometimes find the following failures. The good news is these missteps can be corrected over time. Usually, the team has spent time, money and effort doing a lot of random acts of marketing with little understanding of how to gauge successful progress.

#10 -- Weak Messaging

It seems so simple, but given that the average American is bombarded with 4,000 - 10,000 advertising messages every single day (think social media, online ads, emails, text messages, posters, signage, etc.) they quickly become desensitized to messages that are not immediately and directly relevant (Source: Zippia).

The most impactful, compelling and effective messaging offers a value proposition that answers a deep pain or need that the recipient has, succinctly lays out a solution and clearly articulates why the company’s solution beats the competition (or any alternatives one has at the moment). Miss the mark with your messaging and your marketing campaigns may deliver lackluster results.

To create message that hits the mark, ensure that it is specific to key client segments and personas. If you offer a one-size-fits-all messaging strategy, you will likely be a victim of failure #9.

#9 -- Target Too Broad (not relevant)

The energetic optimism of leadership often leads marketing to address an audience that is as broad as possible. However, without narrowing the target and focusing on developing the proper messaging and advertising channel for each segment, even a digital marketing campaign, with all of its targeting and segmenting potential, can flounder.

Following the segmented messaging strategy that avoids fail #10, test messages by creating campaigns by segment, starting with the segments most likely to convert. Once you nail messaging and creative with your core target, then and only then, expand to new segments and double down on winners as you go. Using this strategy will hep you avoid spreading your campaign dollars too thin up front before they show an acceptable ROI.

Keep your eye on all campaigns whether they are winners or losers, and keep monitoring and iterating or you’ll run into failure #8.

#8 -- Failure to Monitor & Iterate

Often the fallacy of digital marketing is that you can set it and forget it – the automation takes the work out of marketing. Not true!  With constant changes in platform algorithms and new competitors upping the ante every day, even winning campaigns are vulnerable and may either stop performing or suddenly require double or triple the spend to gain the same results.

You can and should fine-tune and tweak a mature digital marketing campaign to manage performance and expansion. It requires patience, diligence and know how. As competition enters the market, or companies adjust their attention and spend, knowledge of what success looks like is the critical north star needed to guide website SEO, social media, search engine business profiles and other listings, and paid social campaigns.

Businesses often forget that their most loyal clients may come from their neighborhood, and failing to optimize campaigns to win searches from local clients is failure #7.

#7 -- Neglecting Local SEO

According to Google, 46% of searches have local intent and 97% of people search online for a local business (Source: Social Media Today). Many local businesses think broader is better (failure #2). However, with a location-based business, spending heavily on competitive (read: expensive) national campaigns and neglecting to win the clients next door results in high cost and low conversion. If a business that cultivates a geographically centric clientele forgets to localize their campaigns and spends unknowingly on common keywords that national businesses are spending heavily to win, they may quickly exhaust their (typically smaller) budget.

As more search volume comes from mobile devices, Google often knows where users are and serves up search results accordingly, even without the user actually typing in the city or state names. Sites and profiles that are optimized to win the long tail local geo searches are more likely to get served up by Google on page 1 or in the “Local Pack” that appears below the map in a google search.

If a business from the next town over wins the organic traffic that you have the right to win because you are the located in the area the user searched – it’s likely because the  search engines do not realize you exist. This lack of visibility results from not having the right presence and terms on your Google Business Profile, Bing Places page or in local directories.  If you expect your clientele to come from your neighborhood, neglecting to focus on local SEO means that the competition grows at your expense.

#6 -- Ignoring the Buyer Journey

We’ve discussed the importance of insights – understanding the often long and winding road buyers take, and understanding their objections, questions, and concerns at every stage along the prospect journey.

Every buyer journey goes thru the same stages, some more quickly than others. Initially they are unaware, then aware, then considering among alternatives and finally, ready to buy or commit. The mistake companies often make is delivering the wrong message at the wrong stage. Companies that “feature speak” to build awareness miss the fact that an unaware buyer might not even realize he or she has a need for your product or service!

Once a buyer becomes a client, you have a golden opportunity to help them bring in your next client. Failure to do so is #5.

#5 -- Not Cultivating Word of Mouth (to get referrals)

If you want greater efficiency in your marketing initiatives, strive to drive a greater percentage of your new clients thru referrals. While referrals are not always low cost or free as some people might think -– you might have to invest in incentives and support to ensure referrals happen –- they are generally warmer leads that convert faster, with a shorter sales cycle.

Don’t expect that referrals come naturally. Even if they like and appreciate you, people are busy and often don’t know what to say. To build a successful referral program, requires establishing consistent processes for asking for, following up on, and measuring the value of our efforts. Failure to create a process and program around cultivating referrals by supporting your happy clients is money left on the table.

If you can create a reliable, repeatable referral engine, and one out of 10 clients refers 1-10 new clients (Source: Get Ambassador) you can increase the efficiency of marketing campaigns significantly, while also increasing retention and shortening sales cycles and acquisition costs.

#4 -- Lots of Activity with Unclear Goals

With digital, yes, it’s possible to track many metrics. But which ones are most important?  If your goals are unclear, your team or agency may be optimizing toward the wrong metrics. Or they may be thinking they are achieving success when in actuality, they are not delivering the results you want.

Even worse, your campaigns may not be aligned to the buyer’s journey (especially if you are not paying attention to the buyer journey, fail #6) and may be resulting in lower conversion rates. If your goal is awareness, but you’re delivering a campaign optimized for  signups, your creative visuals and messaging might not be as compelling as they could be to the unaware eyeballs to which the platform is serving up ads.

Why should you care if campaigns are not as efficient as they could be? All it takes is a smart competitor trained to avoid these types of digital marketing failures, and you’re at a competitive disadvantage. You’ll have a higher cost per lead and lower profitability on every new client you bring in – which is part of failure #3.

#3 -- Overspending or Underspending

If you are burning cash without delivering results, or bringing in clients at a higher cost than your competitors, you are overspending. To get on track, you must measure results from every campaign and be clear on the objectives. Then if you have winners, you can invest more with greater assurance of return on investment.

Underspending is putting too little into the efforts to learn and expand your marketing efforts. A digital ad budget of $500 per month might not be enough to draw enough traffic or may take too long to yield  enough conversions to achieve the statistical significance to feel confident about deciding when, how, and where to expand your marketing spend intelligently.

But before you start to ratchet up the spend, make sure that you’re not susceptible to failure #2.

#2 -- Lack of Clarity

Not having clarity around where campaigns fit in delivering funnel objectives (top, mid, bottom), and the baseline metrics you want to achieve, can result in misalignment of campaigns to goals.

If you fully understand the buyer’s journey and the message you need to deliver at each stage to successfully build awareness and to impact consideration and achieve conversion, you should then be able to define marketing campaigns that effectively reach and move prospects through the funnel. Unfortunately, many companies think about marketing by channel – such as social media, direct mail, events, website & Google search – and not about where to best “intercept” the prospect on their journey.

As a result, they may be investing too much money in top or bottom of funnel campaigns, and not enough in the nurturing at each stage of the buyers journey, wasting their top of funnel investment and making their hard won leads vulnerable to a competitor at the conversion stage.

Finally, if you have experienced any of the 9 failures I’ve described so far, and decided not to address them, you could be vulnerable to the most egregious failure of them all and #1 on my list.

#1 -- Wasting Money and Time

Continuing to spend money and not fixing everything above (and hoping it will get better without really doing anything differently). After all, as Albert Einstein aptly put it, this approach is the definition of insanity.

Companies that fail at digital marketing often realize it too late – when they have run out of money, time or lost market share to a competitor. They run out of money because they haven’t gotten enough traction to break even and the competition has pulled ahead.

Don’t let this be you. As fractional CMOs, we are often hired by clients to help address the stalled growth that follows from these digital marketing failures. We’ve seen this movie before and we know how it's going to end. So if you don’t like the ending, change it now!