The Pathway of Digital Marketing 

Every business should strive to improve their digital presence through online marketing. Most businesses go through quite a dramatic journey before they settle on a digital marketing solution that is satisfying. More often than not, our customers have expressed all the frustrations and difficulties they have encountered before coming to us. We call this The Pathway of Digital Marketing.

Let’s take a look at the most common steps taken by most businesses before they reach a digital marketing solution they are happy with. Hopefully, by discussing a lot of these pitfalls and missteps, we can help you avoid these problems and focus on a better solution. 

Step 1: Ask Google - Research

What is a better place to find an online marketing solution than online? This step is not so much a mistake but it is where everyone’s journey begins. We want to know how we can grow our business so we look to the ever-growing internet to answer our questions. 

This is a great place to start but often it can become an overwhelming sea of information and data. Articles, guides, videos, and forums all trying to offer the best solution for all your problems. The truth is, there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to digital marketing. 

So many days and weeks can be wasted on this step swimming through all the advice and opinions offered by everyone with an internet connection. Most of the time the term that keeps popping up is SEO and after some time our customers will think “Hey, I can do that.” which brings us to our next step…

Step 2: DIY

Here is where our first real pitfall occurs. While we may have spent a lot of time researching, that knowledge can be a good place to start for many. The problem is that knowledge is only a portion of a digital marketing solution. Knowledge without experience and context can sometimes be useless. It is all about how we apply that knowledge that matters. 

Most of our customers tell us stories of how they spent all of this time writing up their own copy, spending money on Google Ad campaigns with no change in site traffic. The only thing worse than no marketing campaign is a bad marketing campaign. This can be a dangerously demoralizing experience and many consider giving up. But then we find hope. A professional digital marketing agency could be the solution!

Step 3: Just find someone else

Sometimes this can result in the full solution that our customers needed all along. Unfortunately, most of our customers do not arrive at this solution so easily. This step can end up being a costly mistake for many of our clients. A bad digital marketing agency is the modern-day snake oil salesman. They will sell you a solution and make you feel like you got the deal of the lifetime and at the end of the whole experience, you are left wondering what they even did.

Perhaps you got sold a service that ended up being one of those “one size fits all” solutions that you read about during your research. Maybe your stepmother’s cousin’s son offered to do it for you. In either case, this is where most businesses will give up. This step will often drain a company’s marketing budget and make them lose all hope for a digital marketing solution. Many of our customers got to this step thinking that their business was just not meant for the online space. 

Step 4: Carefully Selected Digital Marketing Partner

The final step in this journey - and the real beginning of the successful marketing path - is the absolute most important part because it is where we finally find our solution. I want to emphasize the word Partner here because a Digital Marketing Agency should be seen as such. If your digital marketing agency is not taking the time to learn your business, identify your strengths and weaknesses, and offer up a plan that you can understand, they might not be a great fit and you might still be on step 3. If your Digital Marketing Agency is taking time to help identify what the key metrics for your success are, then you are definitely on step 4.

A high-quality Agency should come prepared with the experience and knowledge necessary to bring your business into the online space and offer you a customized solution that fits your needs. This is what Kubla offers to its customers and you should always expect the same. Wherever you are on the Pathway of Digital Marketing, we think it is about time to contact us.

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