Digital Marketing

While artificial intelligence has not gone the way of Skynet (just yet), 2019 has been noted by many digital marketing consultants and professionals as a game-changing year regarding machine learning.

For digital marketers, this means improved understanding of consumer behavior as well as improved digital marketing campaigns and streamlined implementation. This potentially holds a bevy of benefits for business owners.

Today, we’re taking a look at how automation can help you to perfect your 2019 digital marketing campaigns in a way that will build up fat returns on your investment.

Automation Should Focus on Profitable Growth Over Efficiency

It may be tempting to optimize and use an automated program so that certain business processes can be more efficient. But by doing so, you may be limiting how you see the overall big picture.

Optimizing an automated process that focuses on increasing profits instead can be a better option. In other words, you want to focus on what’s profitable in the long run, not what makes you a quick, easy buck. Many businesses in late 2017 began to adopt this philosophy, resulting in great returns.

For instance, HomeAway, a vacation rental marketplace, really put in the elbow grease in 2017 by using automation. In essence, the company — through automation and machine learning — categorized particular members of their audience that viewed certain pieces of content or ads and set them into groups based on their real-time behaviors.

This gave the company the ability to tailor content and messaging that engaged with potential customers until they were ready to make a decision. This simple act ended up skyrocketing their annual revenue by 115 percent!

Automation Should Help You Find the Right Customer

Many of the industry’s top marketers have designed automated programs that utilize machine learning to allocate funds for finding long-term customers. The goal here is to find customers that provide more sales opportunities over a long period of time and weed out the one-and-doners.

And it has been successful. Finding customers that have a higher customer lifetime value (CLV) isn’t always an easy task, but with automation, lots of possibilities are revealed. For those that need a little refresher, CLV is a prediction that takes into account how much a customer will spend throughout the business-consumer relationship. It is determined through many different calculations that we won’t get into today.

But I can provide you with an example.

Let’s say you own a bakery, and occasionally, you’ll have a customer that will come in to purchase one of your most expensive cakes. Not always, but every now and then. Then, of course, you have your regular; the individual that comes in every day to buy a couple of pastries.

Out of either of these two, which one would you consider to have a higher customer lifetime value?

It’s the regular that provides your bakery with a steady flow of revenue every day.

Using automation to help your marketing efforts target these frequent customers over the rare big spenders should be paramount, as it is these people that sustain your business in the long term.

Automation Should Help Your Business Earn More From Existing Customers

As the old proverb goes, “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” And when it comes to keeping customers engaged and retaining their business, automation has made that process much easier.

The extra revenue that comes in from existing customers can then be allocated to acquiring new customers.

One way that experts increase CLV is to improve on their cross-selling. What these top marketers do is predict what kind of product a customer will buy next and actively market it to them, sometimes through automation. This information can be garnered from similar purchases made previously, social media likes, content viewed, or a variety of other data points that an automated program can pick up regarding past behaviors.

Another technique to improve CLV is through churn reduction. Having an automated program that picks up on at-risk customers — possibly targeting previous customers who haven’t interacted with your brand on social in some time – and then offering them a heck of a deal to earn their business back works great.

With automation, the sky’s the limit to not only making your marketing process more efficient, but to making it more profitable.

Nothing beats a solid investment into hiring an experienced digital marketing consultant. Contact me, Mauricio Piña, today at (956) 566-4998 to learn how automation can improve your digital marketing efforts.

First off, Happy New Year!

Now’s the perfect time to refresh our approach to digital marketing. And the easiest way to devise those strategies is by learning from our past mistakes.

We’re starting off the year with a look at what mistakes we should avoid if we want to run a successful digital marketing campaign in 2019.

Check this out.

4 Digital Marketing Mistakes You Need to Avoid in 2019

1. Creating Content Just Because
Search engine optimization changes all the time, but the one true constant that Google focuses on is factual, meaningful, and valuable content. You can guarantee that won’t be changing anytime soon.

Content shouldn’t be created just to fill space on your website. That is a surefire way to feel the wrath of Google’s ranking system. Content should contain valuable information that will meet visitor needs in some manner.

Google gauges this by taking into account multiple metrics such as measuring the duration of the visit, as well as if the visitor went to another similar website after viewing your site, just to name a few.

That’s why developing content that answers visitors’ questions is paramount to retaining a high Google ranking on the results page. Be sure to ask yourself questions like:

1. Does my content help build up my brand?
2. Will my content gain – and keep – visitors’ trust?
3. Will it attract potential customers/clients?
4. What format are visitors responding to most: video, blogs, vlogs, live streams, or webinars?
5. What exactly do I know about your target audience?
6. Do I have a strategy developed for sharing the content on a social media platform?

All of these questions are relevant to establishing yourself as a reliable source of information that visitors can trust – and trust earns business.

2. Having Undefined Goals
Having set goals helps you choose what tactics you need to achieve them, allows you to better understand areas of improvement, and offers a clear sight of what obstacles you need to overcome to get there.

And they have to be clearly defined, realistic goals. If your goal was to establish a dominating social media brand, signing up on all social media platforms isn’t necessarily going to get you there. While Facebook and Instagram might earn you some business, Reddit may not particularly cater to your niche. Therefore, it wouldn’t make sense to focus on Reddit if it provides little value to you, regardless if your competition is doing so themselves.

Think about it this way. Would you trust a surgeon that didn’t have a plan if they were about to perform a major surgery on you? I’d hope not. As with many other things in life, you need a plan to get to those streams of revenue that a good digital marketing strategy can unlock.

3. Multiple Profiles, Over-Promoting, and Poor Reply Etiquette
It goes without saying that a brand that has multiple Facebook or Twitter accounts is going to confuse consumers. It’s also a waste of your company’s time and resources.

That’s why it is so important to have a one social media account per social media platform. It ensures that your social media followers know where to go to find out the latest company news, offers, or company-led conversations.

In the end, that’s all social media is all about: being social and communicative.

But there’s a fine line between having a meaningful interaction with a follower and saturating their feed with nothing but promotional content. This can feel a little spammy and nothing encourages brand abandonment quite like spam. Aim for effective and efficient promotion, not the “shooting fish in a barrel” approach.

Lastly, be social on social media. That means having more engagements, interactions, and conversations with your followers. There have been plenty of times where a brand posted engaging content on Facebook that piqued a followers interest, just to lose that opportunity because they refused to reply.

Replying to a follower solidifies their brand loyalty, assists in retaining followers and attracts more consumers to your brand. Refusing to reply is not only a wasted opportunity to grow your brand, but it can also possibly decrease your value as a social media presence.

4. Expecting Instant Results
The world of digital marketing is a fascinating one. Sometimes important decisions come on the fly, but the results can take some time to come to fruition.

That is why you shouldn’t expect instantaneous results. The anticipation in waiting to see if your campaign was successful can be overwhelming, but your patience will be rewarded.

Sure, digital marketing can net you some quick successes — like an increase in your website traffic — but oftentimes, that quick success is only temporary. Then shortly after, you are left wondering what you can do to make another quick buck. In the long run, this isn’t a sustainable digital marketing business model. Work smarter, not harder.

You need to develop long-term content marketing strategies that focus on crafting high-quality content through different methods of distribution. We’re talking through copy, video, social media – the whole works. And the best way to do that is to hire an expert digital marketing consultant.

Hiring an experienced digital marketing consultant like me, Mauricio Piña, is a surefire way to avoid these mistakes in 2019. Don’t hesitate to contact me today at (956) 566-4998 to learn more.

Suffice to say that analytics play a pivotal role in the world of digital marketing. Data helps tremendously when developing your content strategy, social media campaigns, making changes to your website, and essentially all other aspects of your digital marketing strategy.

But understanding analytics can be a challenge if you aren’t familiar with which you should be keeping an eye on. As your friendly digital marketing consultant, I’d like to share with you some basics about web analytics. By better understanding web analytics, you can make valuable improvements to your website – which should ultimately improve your sales and your business.

What Are Analytics

Analytics is the system by which you collect and analyze data. This information is collected from your website, as well as through other channels like your social media profiles and includes information involving site visitor activity, SEO performance, and other key areas.

Generally, data is collected everytime a user visits your website or social media profile(s), tracking them from when they first enter until they leave. This individual data is recorded into a larger databank where you can begin to see bigger trends, like which website pages are attracting the most visitors and which pages have the highest bounce rate.

Ultimately, the more you know about your site visitors and customers, the easier it is to figure out how to draw them in and get them to spend more.

Key Analytics to Monitor

The truth is that there is a ton of information that you can draw from your analytics but the secret is to set goals beforehand and use the data to measure how far or close you are to reaching them. It’s important to recognize that your digital marketing campaign doesn’t always have to be about conversions and sales, you can also focus on:

• Building strong customer relationships by providing meaningful information.
• Building your company up as an expert in your industry.
• Building up and promoting higher value services.
• Attracting a newer, more lucrative client demographic.

In terms of basic data metrics, you should be keeping an eye on, you’ll want to take note of the following key analytics:

• Visits – This is the number of visitors that come to your site within a given time frame (which you can dictate). The same visitor can be counted as multiple visits. For example, 1 visitor coming to your site 10 times within a month will count as 10 visits.
• Unique Visitors – This data focuses on the number of unique individuals that visit your site within a given time frame. Visitors are only counted once, regardless of how many times they visit your site.
• Page Views – This metric measures the website pages that are viewed by visitors. You can determine the average page view per visitor using this “formula” (Page views ÷ Visits = Page views per visit).
• Time-on-Site –  This is the average amount of time that users stay on your site during a visit.
• Bounce Rate – The bounce rate is the measurement of how quickly a website visitor enters and leaves your site. The lower the bounce rate, the better.
• Top Pages – Knowing which pages are receiving the most love can prove to be vital as it helps to show you what your audience responds to and prefers. You can use this info to make adjustments to the rest of your content.
• Conversion Rate – Your conversion rate is essentially the goal that you have set for your visitors. You can calculate this number by dividing the number of unique visitors you get and the number of those that “convert”, which can include:
  • Making a purchase
  • Submitting an email to join your mailing list
  • Sharing on social media
  • Liking your page

Common Traffic Sources

A key component to effectively understanding your website traffic is knowing where your traffic is coming from. By effectively knowing where your visitors are coming from, you can spend more resources on these components. For instance, are your site visitors finding you on Google? Then you’ll want to place emphasis on your SEO strategy to ensure they are able to find you organically via this (and other) search engine.

In terms of traffic sources, the most common ones are:

• Organic – Traffic that comes via search engines.
• Direct – Traffic that comes from someone typing in your URL in their address bar or through a bookmark.
• Referral – Traffic that comes from another website to yours.
• Paid Search – Traffic that comes from search engines that have a search ad of your business.
• Social – Website traffic that comes from social media networks (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.)

Again, knowing where your traffic is coming from can help you to improve your overall marketing strategy. A qualified digital marketing consultant can help to break down the numbers and conversion rate by traffic source to uncover which works best for you and how you can continue to optimize this source.

Improving Your Conversion Rate

Alongside using this data to make meaningful adjustments to your overall digital marketing strategy, make sure to also:

• Include plenty of calls-to-action throughout your website and make sure they are in areas where they can be easily found.
• Make the checkout process as seamless and quick as possible. A convoluted checkout process can lead to plenty of abandoned carts.
• Headlines and sliders should grab visitors’ attention and include CTAs.
• Experiment with A/B testing on ads and landing pages to see what type of copy and images customers prefer.

Keep in mind that web analytics are not the end all of your digital marketing plans, but should, nonetheless, play an important role in your overall strategy. Use these data points as the tools that they are and make 2019 a record year.

Need help figuring out all your web analytics data?

Reach out to the digital marketing expert, Mauricio Piña, today at (956) 566-4998.

All right, time to confess. Earning and building links is hard work. If you spam too many links in your content, you risk losing your ranking on Google search as well as customer confidence. If you don’t earn any links to your website, you won’t be seen as the credible source of information that you are.

If my experience as a digital marketing consultant has taught me anything, it’s this: a little elbow grease in building and earning links goes a long way when driving traffic to your site. The more (and better quality) traffic you get, the higher the potential for making conversions and sales.

Today we are going to analyze the benefits link building and earning can provide to your digital marketing campaign.

What are the Benefits of Link Building?

You may be thinking, “Why would I need to worry about building or earning links when there are literally hundreds of other SEO factors that go into Google’s ranking system?”

That’s a fair question. In short, it’s because link building and earning helps:

1. Grows Your Traffic – Let’s imagine that you are a grapefruit distributor, and you’ve recently written up a blog post highlighting your fruit’s sweetness, tartness, and uniqueness.

Not long after, you are contacted by a highly recognized company (e.g. Food Network) and are asked if they can link a recipe to your blog piece. This is great news for your business.

If this company that contacted you has a huge Internet presence, and if they are linking out to your website, that’ll help to direct online traffic your way. Once at your company’s website, a properly placed call-to-action can entice site visitors to purchase your fruit. If they have found your website helpful and engaging, they may even interact with your social media accounts.

2. Provides Value to Search Engines – Remember how I mentioned earlier that Google ranking is governed by 200 other factors? Well, links have a high value in this list of factors.

This is why a lot of authority websites have top spots in Google’s ranking system. Many other websites are likely linking out to these authority sites, which in turn helps to build up their credibility even more. Think of it as a vote. The more “votes” a website has, the higher its position in the search engine results page (SERP).

To build off the example above, since your website was linked to an authority website, Google will recognize that you are a credible source of information regarding grapefruit. So when someone is searching for grapefruits, your page is more likely to show up on the SERP.

3. Increases Brand Awareness – In tandem with everything above, link building and earning can enhance brand awareness through “influencers.”

If an influencer happens to run across your product and begins to promote it, you gain access, in a sense, to their followers and audience. To illustrate, let’s say that there is a “grapefruit influencer” that has over a million viewers on their YouTube channel. One day while searching for new and interesting recipes, the enthusiast happens upon the authority website that originally linked out to you.

Later, you get a notification from the influencer that they would like to create video content featuring your grapefruit. Of course, you give the okay so long as they link out to your company website. You notice not too long after the influencer has created their content about your product, that your traffic metrics have grown substantially.

Through that influencer, through the authority website, and through your own efforts, you have effectively increased your brand awareness and brought in a new swarm of customers.

Summing It Up

Link building and earning can definitely help to draw more traffic to your website, but it must come with a delicate touch. If you’re looking for some tips on how to earn links, we have a blog just for that as well.

It’s important to know that you can’t just spam links in your blog post as Google looks down on that. Being renowned as a link-spammer rather than a purveyor of a quality product is a surefire way to lose reputation and ranking with Google and, more importantly, future sales.

Link building and earning is by no means a “kickback” kind of thing either. It takes a certain drive, a hustle, to earn these types of relationships with other websites. One shouldn’t focus so much on paying for links or spamming, but you should instead focus on producing quality content and connecting that content with the right audience for maximum brand exposure.

Do you need an expert’s touch to help make your link building happen? Look no further than Mauricio Piña, your experience digital marketing consultant. Contact me today at (956) 566-4998 to find out how I can help improve your digital marketing campaigns.

Digital marketing is a science, and like any science, hypotheses have to be tested in order to become an accepted theory.

Digital marketing consultants are like scientists analyzing the effects of digital marketing on target audiences. Better results get implemented in digital marketing campaigns that create revenue.

Today, we’re going to develop a better understanding of a test that can help you figure out where the weak points in your digital marketing campaign are and how you can utilize the results to improve your conversion rates. To do that, that means getting down and dirty in your conversion rate optimization (CRO) tests – also known as A/B testing.

Hold Up…What Exactly is A/B Testing?

The reason we conduct A/B testing is to give us clear insight into how one version of a campaign compares to another. Oftentimes, the differences between campaigns aren’t that drastically different from one another. It can be something as simple as switching up copy in an ad or experimenting with colors in your call-to-action to see if it encourages click-throughs.

Because of this, A/B testing is also known as split testing, and it is known as one of the easier CRO tests to conduct.

How Does A/B Testing Work?

Let’s say, for example, that your company website doesn’t have the best conversion rate. One day you come across a blog that states that placing a call-to-action (CTA) in your content helps to improve your conversion rate.

Blogs that were written before never had a CTA and now you want to run a little experiment. In this experiment, one blog post has a CTA—known as the “challenger” in A/B testing. The other is staying true to the older blog post guidelines where no CTA was written in – this is the “control.”

Before you post the blogs, you set a number of 500 visitors that will be used as a sample size of sorts, depending on your audience settings or preferences. These visitors will be distributed randomly, yet equally, to view either the challenger or control blog post.

After a set amount of time, that you’ll determine,  you’ll check out the results of the test to see which blog post has more leads and conversions.

What you might discover is that the blog without the CTA required too many steps for visitors to complete before they could find the featured product in your blog. We’re talking having to go into the sidebar, click “Shop,” search for the actual item, all while your hope they don’t abandon their cart.

On the other hand, the blog with a CTA encourages site visitors via copy and a link to the actual product page to quickly find the product and purchase. You might find that this particular blog improved conversion rates by 20 percent.

Once the A/B test has concluded, you might find it in your best interest to continue writing CTAs into your content. Later on down the road, you might want to run another A/B test to see if CTA placement is better at the top or bottom of a blog, or at the beginning rather than the end of video content.

And that’s A/B testing in a nutshell. Essentially changing portions of your various marketing campaigns – from social to blogs and everything in between – to see what works best to convert visitors.

The possibilities are endless!

Need some additional A/B testing marketing tips? Reach out to the digital marketing expert, Mauricio Piña, today at (956) 566-4998.

The times, they are a-changin’.

If you’ve been in the digital marketing world like me, Mauricio “Moe” Piña, for some time, then you’ve probably learned to roll with the punches. And why do I mention the importance of evolving and adapting in digital marketing?

Because, according to Forbes, 2019 will see a renaissance of sorts in digital marketing with global consumer Internet video traffic accounting for 80 percent of all consumer Internet traffic. This was backed by Google search engine this past summer when they updated results pages with video carousels rather than individual video boxes.

What does this mean for business owners? Basically, it’s time to step up your video content strategy.

Whether you’ve never uploaded a video or it’s been some time since you’ve worked on getting traffic to one, I’ve got a couple of tips on how you can improve your organic video search results.

Check them out below.

Attracting Moe Traffic to Video Content

1. Integrate Videos Into Related Blogs and Articles

This is one of the easiest actions you can take to improve organic video results if you already have plenty of content that you can work with. Check your data to see what blogs and articles have had an impact on your audience and consider using these.

Embedded videos in your articles and other content not only enhance the visitor’s experience but can also help to increase your website’s page views, sessions, and, ultimately, your conversion rate.

Lumen5 is an exceptional tool that can help turn blogs and long-form content into video in just a few short minutes.

2. Take Advantage of the Description Box

The video description box that you see while diving down the YouTube rabbit hole is a valuable piece of digital marketing real estate. And, yet, time after time, business owners fail to take full advantage of this valuable space.

Adding a direct link to your website into a video description enables your viewers to easily access relevant information that could enhance the user experience. Think about it…what’s better – a viewer interested in your product having to go through the whole process of minimizing YouTube, opening up an Internet browser on another tab or window, keying in search terms, and hoping that your website populates in the first search engine results page? Or a direct link straight to your website.

One click versus multiple steps is always the way to go.

Failing to properly take advantage of the description box is likely going to end in failed conversions. That’s money out of your pocket for something that can be easily remedied.

Aside from a link, a video transcription can also help to improve your video in multiple ways, including:

1. Improves SEO – In a 3-week long study conducted by SafeNet, researchers compared the search rank of a video that had no transcript versus the results after a transcript had been added. Almost a month later, the video content with the transcripts climbed search rankings for targeted keyword phrases, rising from no rankings to top 15 or higher.
2. Provides a Better User Experience – From a learning perspective, adding a video transcript enables your viewer to use whatever method he or she learns from best—whether that be from reading, watching, listening, or all three. Transcripts also simplify the search process for users looking for videos that hit particular topics or keywords.
3. Reach a New Audience – Lastly, transcripts also provide a means of learning for those that may be deaf or non-native English speakers. Expanding your audience is always a plus in the world of digital marketing.

Putting in the extra effort to create and market your video content can really pay dividends in the long run. When it comes to your visitors, however, they need to be able to navigate through your content as effortlessly as possible. Adding in relevant, optimized links and video transcripts in your video help to do just that.

3. Pinpoint Your Video Gaps and Create Content That Addresses Them

Coming up with content ideas can be hard, especially when you have to manage a business. I mean, you could hire a digital marketing team, but if you prefer a more hands-on approach, then there are some steps you can take to enhance your video marketing skills.

To start, you will want to analyze popular search queries and compare those terms to your current video library. Doing this should provide you with some insight into figuring out where your video content gaps are and what type of information you need to provide users to bridge that space.

Let’s say, for example, that you’re in the business of selling grapefruits. You have started creating video content that showcases the many ways that you can prepare grapefruits into extravagant dishes fit for parties and holiday get-togethers. While you may be getting a relatively small stream of viewers watching your content, there’s still more that you can do.

When doing some research and analyzing popular grapefruit search queries, you may find out that many people are looking for adult beverage recipes that include grapefruits. By pinpointing the content gap, you’ve identified what the buyer needs and how you can address those needs. Now you can make an actionable video content campaign that addresses those queries (i.e. grapefruit infused drinks).

Not only does this tip help to provide you with some content ideas, but it can also do wonders in bringing in more viewers/visitors.

Now is the time to perfect time to prepare your video content strategy. If you need more information on where to begin, then contact me, Mauricio Piña, for all of your digital marketing consultant needs at (956) 566-4998.

Whether you own a brick and mortar store or are part of the online market square, the holiday season is the most lucrative time of the year – especially if you have your marketing and sales funnels in order.

While you should have, hopefully, a digital marketing plan in place by this point in the year, there’s still enough time to implement a couple of strategies if you don’t.

Listed below are four valuable digital marketing tips you can use to attract potential customers this holiday season. And in case you missed it, one of our recent posts also dives into social media marketing for the holiday season.

Last Second Digital Marketing Tips for the Holidays

1. Schedule Your Content Ahead of Time
This one is really important. It’s no surprise that when the holiday season comes around, things get busy. But just because you lack the time to do standard search engine optimization doesn’t mean that you get to deviate from your digital marketing responsibilities. No, you’ve got to plan ahead.

Crafting blog posts, product reviews, video, tweets, email marketing, and/or managing social media accounts has to get done early to be effective. Thankfully, a lot of social media platforms give us the ability to schedule everything in advance, which should allow you to cover your business until the holiday period is over.

If you haven’t gotten to it, now is the time to create some winter holiday-related content, social posts, ads, and blogs.

2. Use Seasonal Pay-Per-Click Keywords
If you don’t use seasonal keywords in your Google Ads campaign, you’re shooting yourself in the revenue-generating foot. Some year-round keywords can be mildly successful, but normally, users are searching for holiday-related terms. And if these aren’t included into your ad campaign, your business runs the risk of underperforming sale wise.

Let’s say for example that you own a bakery. The keywords “buy cookies” may cut it for the majority of the year, but if you don’t start bidding on seasonal keywords like “Christmas cookies” or “gingerbread,” you could really stymie your sales.

A successful PPC campaign will always include seasonal keywords that are meant to attract potential customers to your product, but it doesn’t stop there. Solid research and testing are paramount when finding out what works and what doesn’t.

And a good way is to check last year’s data to see what was trending.

3. Holiday-ify Your Branding
This is probably the most cost-effective and easiest way to incorporate holiday marketing into your business. The addition of a simple visual update to your logo that is related to the holidays shows that your company’s website is up-to-date.

You can even get really creative and create a holiday mascot, much like Coca-Cola and their polar bear ad campaigns, which have been going strong for years.

4. Retarget Your Customers
Retargeting customers can be approached from many different angles. Many times, it involves solid email and/or social media marketing campaigns to reach out to past customers that:

• May have purchased a product from you in the past (perhaps last holiday season).
• May have shopped online on your website but abandoned the shopping cart.
• Are loyal to your particular brand, thus purchasing products or services more often.
• Should be informed of holiday discounts—or exclusive returning customer discounts—that they can take advantage of.

Not only does retargeting past and potential customers encourage sales, but it also fosters customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. It also goes without saying that a happy customer improves your word-of-mouth advertising.

Need some additional holiday-related marketing tips? Reach out to the digital marketing expert, Mauricio Piña, today at (956) 566-4998.

It’s no secret that the professional world comes with an abundance of stressors. And it’s no different for digital marketers.

As a digital marketing consultant, I know just how challenging a single day of marketing can be. From developing the perfect social media campaign to creating enthralling content and blogs, there’s plenty of pressures that can drive you off the digital edge.

Luckily, I’ve developed a few techniques to help me get through the day and deal with some of the industry’s most common (and problematic) stressors:

What Drives Marketers Mo’ Crazy

1. Daunting Data

It isn’t collecting the data that’s the problem; it’s what comes after that can drive a digital marketer insane. When you’ve diligently planned and put all your effort into a campaign but the metrics just don’t show you the results you expected – stress overload.

If that isn’t enough, you have to justify reworking the campaign to the client.

When setting up your marketing plan, have your goals in order, and include some that aren’t tied into just sales. There is plenty a digital marketing campaign can do for a business and these objectives can turn daunting data into a meaningful success.

2. “Barely There” Budgets

It’s an unfortunate truth, but as the old saying goes, sometimes you have to spend money to make money. This is especially true in the digital marketing industry where Pay-Per-Click advertising can require some solid investment.

Of course, one of the biggest benefits of digital marketing is cost-effectiveness. Just because a client doesn’t have a million dollars to throw at a digital marketing plan doesn’t mean they can’t find some success. As a digital marketer, you just have to be honest and set realistic goals.

3. Overcoming Google Updates

If there’s one thing every digital marketer loves, it’s Google’s constant – and we mean constant – updates. These updates can happen multiple times a day and major ones can absolutely devastate a website’s ranking if we aren’t on top of things.

Luckily, there are quite a few strategies – alongside honest to goodness hard work – that can keep you ahead of the curve and your marketing campaign working effectively. All despite Google’s penchant for updating its algorithm.

4. Proving Your Value

The average person (and business owner) may hear the words, digital marketing, and think of cute social media posts with a few emojis or a quick Instagram posts with some hashtags.

But digital marketing is so much more.

Proving your value to a client can take a tremendous amount of energy and strategy. But the pressure to succeed can be made much easier for a digital marketer when they:

• Define their audience
• Specify goals (alongside the client)
• Establish viable budgets
• Effectively design their marketing strategy
• Use data and metrics to correct issues
• A/B test when possible
• Take the results of everything and enhance the campaign as needed

5. The Power of Words

Content is king and getting the right message out in front of the right people is absolutely essential to a successful campaign. But in the process of making sure everything else runs smoothly, it can be very easy to overlook grammatical and spelling errors on any content that gets published.

While a simple error isn’t the end of the world, it can throw off the timeline of a campaign (and continually sloppy work can really hurt your brand).

Take your time. Get your message right on all content and make sure your grammar is on point.

6. Tech Trouble

Tech plays such a huge role in digital marketing. But oftentimes, we get caught up in the strategizing, creation, and implementation of the campaign itself, that we fail to fully account for all of the technical aspects that go into running a successful marketing plan.

When things go sideways on a technical level though, it can bring a world of stress. Keep in mind:

• Make sure all SSL certificates are up-to-date. Failure to have these in place can make your website(s) vulnerable to hackers and your client’s personal information unsafe.
• Mobile optimization is essential in today’s mobile-first world. Shoppers have a growing preference for using their smartphones and a slow website (not optimized) can hurt your bottom line.
• Backup your website data! Website crashes can happen for any number of reasons, and without a backup, you are in some serious trouble.

Dealing with It All

Despite all the craziness that the digital marketing industry brings with it, there are some simple steps that you can take to reduce your stress.

1. Start with recognizing your anxiety.

There’s a difference between rational worries and unjustified anxiety.

Start the process of de-stressing by recognizing those irrational fears and anxieties. Focus on what you actually have power over and take action in those realms.

2. Don’t bite off more than you can chew.

As a digital marketer, you’ll likely have your hand in a lot of different cookie jars.

Doing your fair share of the work is a must, but biting off more than you can chew because of fear that the job won’t get done right is bound to leave you overworked, tired, and stressed. Have faith in the skills of your teammates and allow them to do their jobs.

3. Breathe for a moment.

You might be tempted to remain seated at your desk for 12 straight hours, tackling the day’s assignments. Kudos to you for being such a hard worker, but the reality is that working nonstop without a break is quickly going to lead to a mental breakdown.

Give yourself a moment to breathe throughout the day and take a few minutes to walk around the office or around the block to take in some fresh air and sunshine.

Those few minutes away from the project at hand can actually lead to some insight—or at the very least—they can help you to clear your head and restart your brain.

4. Sometimes you just need to unplug.

As a digital marketer, it’s absolutely possible to remain connected to a project all day and night with your smartphone and computer. Whether it’s responding to emails, updating a social media post, or handling some SEO tasks, working as a digital marketer can become a 24-hour around-the-clock job.

Remember, though, that it’s okay to unplug when necessary. If it’s a few hours in the afternoon to help your child with their homework or a few hours in the morning as you exercise and meditate, unplugging from your phone and computer can really help put you at ease and reduce stress.

5. Work it out—literally.

It’s easy to forget that stress can have a real effect on your body. From causing headaches, teeth grinding, neck ache, back pain, heartburn and stomach pain to truly serious consequences like increasing your risk of cardiovascular diseases, mental health problems, eating disorders and more, stress can exacerbate many health problems.

But fortunately, you can manage stress by exercising a bit. Besides improving your physical health and helping to fight disease, exercise has also been shown to reduce fatigue, improve concentration, and enhance overall cognitive ability. Studies have also shown that regular exercise can even decrease overall levels of stress and tension, elevate your mood, and stimulate anti-anxiety effects.

And don’t forget to continue visiting me here at my website for all things digital marketing and entrepreneurship.