Is this YOUR Journey with Digital Marketing? – take the QUIZ

Check your own journey & timeline against this one. If you’re keeping score, give yourself a point for every one of these that has happened to you.

1. “Our website is old, we need to ‘freshen it up’ with a new look.” The new look is attractive, but the site doesn’t do or say much.
2. Whoever put the site together is frustrated because the experienced subject-matter-experts aren’t contributing much, and complain they are overworked with their day jobs… further, they remind you they aren’t writers.
3. You realize the site needs to fully represent your products, so you choose a web product selection tool and start a huge project with hopes of fully replicating your paper catalog and creating an Amazon-like experience. When done, your selection area doesn’t really help people select the way you (or they) had hoped, or it doesn’t work at all. It now appears to be someone’s full-time job to finish it and/or maintain it forever.
4. You learn that your new website provides analytics. While you’re not exactly sure of what they mean, your euphoria from hearing about thousands of impressions is later trumped by questions about the lack of sales that result from your digital marketing efforts.
5. Somewhere along the way, you’ve discussed e-commerce, and may have taken a few baby steps by adding “request a quotation” or similar buttons to imply online sales. You’re now pretty sure complete e-commerce is a monumental effort and risk.
6. You add Marketing Automation to the mix, with a solid plan to capture and nurture leads all the way through to the sale. Your marketing people acquire, learn and configure the tools. After a bit of run-time, your realize these activities are NOT working with your customers. Your metrics don’t tell you otherwise.
7. You add up your investment dollars and time, sigh, gasp, or scream, and wonder if you’ll ever see a positive return, or even get back to even. Looking around, you don’t even know who to blame.

If you’re experiencing a bunch of these, you’re in the majority. Take heart… Marketing is important. It’s a way to reach many customers and potential customers. All of these issues are fixable and much of the work that has been done will be useful going forward. For those keeping score, more than zero is bad : (

I’m not a website designer, I’m a Marketing & Sales Consultant that designs and fixes processes. In my next article, I’ll shed some light on several “process” things that can help.