Written by Preston Parshall
Learning from mistakes and constantly improving products is a key in all successful companies.
~ Bill Gates
Everyone makes mistakes. When it comes to hearing about the experiences of people I respect, I’m much more interested in learning about their mistakes than their successes. There are a couple of reasons why. The first reason is that it takes great courage, openness, and humility to share what went wrong and how the issue was resolved. Secondly, hearing about mistakes is the quickest way to learn how others leverage a problem-solving mindset to solve their challenges.
At Fujisan Marketing, our goal is to constantly learn and to leverage our knowledge and experience to do things better. One way we do this is by learning from our own mistakes. In this blog post, we share some of our own mistakes and the painful lessons learned. We hope this will help you do things better in your own digital marketing programs.
Not Putting the Work In
Time after time, we come into a pay-per-click (PPC) account or search-engine-optimization (SEO) program that has been on autopilot for over a year.
This is most common when working with a client who has had a retainer with a digital marketing company and literally no work has been done except for a few minor things that can be automated and reporting. This is what not putting the work in looks like from the agency side.
On the client side, the most common example is engaging with an agency before you have the internal resources to implement SEO changes from an audit. However, we’ve seen it in all parts of digital marketing from the client side.
Example:
We engaged with an auto dealership that had an existing vendor for many, many years. SEO was one of the things that they had been doing for them for quite some time. After taking a look under the hood, it appeared that the company had just been making specials updates and sending out reports.
After we took over and started to “do the work,” three months later they were seeing a 50%+ increase in users in year-over-year organic traffic. The previous agency could have seen the same results if they had just kept doing the work.
Not Making Sure Everything is Connected & Checking on Tracking Issues
Access and Connection
This is one has come back to haunt us many times in the past. At the beginning of an engagement, it is critical to digital marketing success to ensure that you have access to all the resources you need and that they are all connected. Why? Because when an engagement starts, everyone is excited to push forward. Requesting needed items at the outset of the work is a far easier time to get what you need before everything goes back to business as usual. Also, it makes you look bad when you ask for something that you should have remembered to get access to in the beginning.
We’ve had to change our process to make sure that we have completed checklists so that we have access to everything we might need to help our clients move forward. Here are a few of the bigger ones:
- Google Analytics (GA) > Google Ads
- Conversion tracking > GA
- Google Search Console (GSC)
- Content management system
- Adding them to the Google Ads My Client Center (MCC)
- Adding Google Tag Manager (GTM) and GA to the site
- Link GSC to GA
- Landing page creator (like Unbounce or Hubspot)
Tracking
Worry about tracking first. If you don’t, you can get in bad position with a client very quickly. For most of our clients, we have run into a tracking issue during our time together. This could be because landing pages were changed out without doing a test conversion to verify proper setup, or because a developer has made changes to a website without giving us a heads up.
Once again, we’ve had to set up checklists for every time a new landing page goes live and we are constantly testing landing page experiences to make sure that our tracking is installed correctly.
Example:
We engaged with an eCommerce company that had been running off an ROI revenue model. After putting together our projections based on a review of the account, we realized quickly that it wasn’t possible to hit those goals due to a pre-existing tracking issue. Revenue was reporting incorrectly in Google Analytics and their shopping center wasn’t setup correctly.
By time we resolved the tracking issue, it was too late for us as their digital marketing agency because we did not hit our original projections.
Not Having Your Foundation in Place
Setting up a digital marketing program correctly is a lot like building a house. You need to make sure that you have a strong foundation and that everything is in place before you start inviting guests (acquisition traffic) over.
Things to consider:
- Is the website tracking setup correctly? (tracking)
- Can the website convert users into customers? (conversion)
- Do we know who we are trying to get to our website? (target demographic)
- Do we understand how the current site is performing? (data analysis)
Example:
We engaged with a company that was headquartered in Central America, but their marketing was being done in the U.S. They had one bread-and-butter B2B service that was very niche. The service that they were trying to promote wasn’t the same service and wasn’t fully fleshed out. The copy that ended up going on the landing page ended up using complicated language that wasn’t definitive.
Also, their development team was slow and unresponsive because they were working on other product offerings. Simple things like adding Google Tag Manager or making changes to the copy on the landing page took large chunks of time. The lead generation program didn’t deliver as we had hoped and was soon retired.
Not Knowing Your Goals
There are times when a client comes to us because they know that digital marketing needs to have a place in their marketing mix. The problem is that they haven’t thought about what exactly success looks like (by channel and per action). We have changed our discovery process to help clients think about goals and objectives of their digital marketing or web presence before we get into more serious discussions.
Without knowing specific goals, it is nearly impossible to tell a client what channel they should use, how much they should spend, or what sort of resources they are going to need internally and from an agency.
Things to consider:
- Website – What things on the website would we like to measure?
- PPC – Do we have the patience and discipline to make this work?
- SEO – Do we have the patience for earned media?
Example:
We engaged with a large travel agency that was focused on growing their client base through PPC. They had been dabbling in PPC spending under $2k per month. Their plan was to increase that budget to over $10k per month. The problem was that they didn’t have a cost per acquisition (CPA) goal or an overall goal for how many leads they wanted for that spend. We outlined how we thought it could perform, but after that, the goals kept changing depending on sales goal for that month.
There were also CRM issues that we eventually got cleaned up, but this led to a lack of clarity to the management team internally. Not knowing what they wanted their goals to be — and then not sticking to the plan after we had fleshed them out — led to an unsuccessful engagement.
Not Having a Client Fit Your Team and Services
This is the biggest one and why we saved it for last. For us, respect, empathy, and open and honest communication are what we are looking for in our potential clients. As a business owner (especially in relatively young business), sometimes it has been hard to say no to profitable clients that don’t match the things that we are looking for. I’ve regretted it every single time. Your team is more important than any single client ever will be.
Example:
We had a SaaS client that we had done good work for in the past, and they had been growing at a dramatic rate as a result. After a year and a half of a good partnership, a new CMO came into the organization and brought his own team.
In a meeting that I’ll never forget, the CMO and his marketing team took us through an exhaustive look at the keywords in the account. They discussed the intent-based thought processes that potential buyers might have for each keyword without looking at the data or even considering it. During the meeting, he was demeaning to some of our team members who were discussing why we had made some of the keyword decisions at certain points even cutting them off mid-sentence. Shortly after, they took the effort in-house.
Conclusion
These are some of the mistakes that we have made over the years. By sharing them, we hope that you have gained some wisdom that you can apply to your future digital marketing efforts. What are some of the mistakes you’ve made in marketing? By sharing, you’ll be teaching us a lot more than by your successes or top 10 lists.
At Fujisan Marketing, we are focused on the hard work involved in doing digital marketing correctly without shortcuts. Through different channels, we’ve been able to research, test and grow our accounts, producing fantastic results for our clients. If this approach resonates with you and your team, send us a note. We’d love to meet you!
Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.
~ Albert Einstein
