Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past decade, you’re likely well aware of digital marketing. Industrial companies know it exists and even know they’re supposed to be doing it, but more often than not, they struggle to execute it and end up abandoning it.
So why is digital marketing and advertising so challenging for the energy sector?
While most companies have heard about the benefits of digital marketing, many haven’t been able to actualize those benefits when running their own programs.
One common experience is the generation of vanity metrics like clicks or impressions but not generating any tangible results from the marketing. For example, a company may have tried investing in ads on Google or social media, and while it generated clicks, it never seemed to affect the bottom line. So, eventually, they just gave up on it.
Unfortunately, this isn’t a unique experience. There are a number of reasons why your digital marketing may be underperforming, but many companies don’t know what to do to turn that around.
One of the reasons digital marketing can fail is a lack of internal resources. Marketing takes continuous work and monitoring to ensure results. But, many industrial companies don’t have a dedicated resource to manage their digital strategy, so despite the best initial intentions – it fails.
Some companies even try investing in technology in hopes that it’ll improve their digital marketing, but they run into the same issue. If no one is actively managing the technology, it gets underutilized and has no visible ROI.
Once a company decides they need to use digital marketing and advertising, they might assign one of their existing team members to it. While it’s great to have someone managing the process, it may still fall short if they lack digital marketing expertise.
Over the past decade, digital marketing has become very powerful but also progressively more complex, making it harder for people to casually take over without prior knowledge.
It’s a never-ending learning process that requires consistent knowledge updates. If the team member handling this doesn’t have this knowledge, you’re setting them up to fail.
What can you do?
One option is to hire an experienced employee to take over your digital marketing strategy.
Unfortunately, hiring can be an expensive, time-consuming process, and often businesses are competing against other companies to get the best resources. This means you may have to train a less experienced hire which will take time. Even then, without the right digital tools and other specialists, it’s difficult to drive ROI in an acceptable time. And finally, many companies don’t need this on a full-time basis.
So, what else can you do?
Enlist the help of experts who are already trained and that you can use on a fractional basis.
A good program can give you access to a team of experts on an ongoing basis to optimize your sales and marketing using a combination of technology and best practices. In effect, they become your outsourced marketing operations team focused on directly growing your sales pipeline – so your team can do what they do best – present and close deals.
Even better, these programs are often a fraction of the cost and time of hiring and training a new employee, so your company can start seeing ROI much faster and at a lower cost.
ActiveConversion is home to leading digital marketing experts who have helped hundreds of energy and industrial companies reach their goals. Find out more here: http://activeconversion.com/managed-services/
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