You hear from marketers and media all the time about how important it is to get good data in digital marketing and in business overall. My view is that although this is technically true the real value comes from understanding it and making good decisions.
Qualitative analysis may very well be the one thing which some AI won’t be able to do better than most people in a few years or ever, I think even if that skill is the most valuable any business owner or employee can harness most people spend their time creating nice looking presentations which if condensed down to their value can be 5 pages long anyway. The focus on keeping face instead of providing real value for the business of my clients is one of the main points which sets AdVision apart from every other agency in the world. Most of our competitors would push their employees to spend their time on keeping that image instead of digging through data and making important decisions based on it.
A lot of business owners have been faced with messed up campaigns, missed market opportunities, competitors overtaking their positions without anybody noticing and decisions which clearly had a negative impact on performance in the long term. I clearly remember having to explain why the previous marketing manager in an agency xyz didn’t notice the decision he made 8 months ago was dead wrong and the clients Revenue kept declining while CPC kept rising….and nobody noticed. The client kept paying their marketing fee ( % of revenue ), the budget has been increased significantly during the same period.
Dealing with such a situation should not be something which business owners should face when they pay a digital marketing agency, their job is to manage the business.
If I pay money for somebody to manage part of the capital of my company I would only ask for Qualitative insights and ways to grow my revenue. “Please tell me what you need to grow my business as fast as possible” That would be me as a client. I won’t be the client to say, please show me the 60 pages of colorful slides at the end of the quarter to get 5 pages of substance which could have been an email and lose 2 hours of mine time.
When you Understand your Data, making the right decisions comes naturally and the results follow not long after that. I prefer to spend 10 hours trying to understand your market, customer, competitors and business offer rather than spend the same time building some long form presentation to upsell or justify my work.
What most agencies offer you purely Quantitative analysis: numbers, bards, charts, facts. What do they mean, how do they relate to your company, what can you do something when all that information is lost for most part.
Taking risks based on good Qualitative analysis has a high risk/rewards ratio
When your digital marketer is doing their job they can give you real recommendations for ways to grow the revenue. This 99% of the time involves restructuring accounts, text, changing images and videos or installing a new tracking code on your website to collect data for a different ad network which they can test for you in a month. A lot of business owners are afraid of big change . . aka exactly what brings big improvements in the results. What I do when I start work with new clients is to dig as deep as possible in their available data: conversions, tracking, ad networks, campaign structure, budgets, audiences, exclusions lists, business propositions and competitors. If any competitor is trying to circle the market we can take measures to make this quest an impossible job for them despite their best efforts unless we are faced by a company which has an amazing value to their customers which can’t be matched.
Truly growing your business after all issues have been solved involves taking calculated risks with time and money. Casual update calls, repetitive weekly/monthly reporting and playing it safe doesn’t cut it when you want to take a larger market that you currently have. Especially after the pandemic when growing on the internet was the only way to survive as a business for many companies. This resulted in inflation.
Beating Inflation in digital marketing
Inflation in PPC & SEO is measured by: CPC ( cost per click ), CPM ( cost per 1000 impressions ) and the time it takes for a new improvement on your website to be recognized by Google’s algorithm and keep your position after that regardless of what your competitors are doing. The speed in SEO has increased big time and the main two cost metrics of advertising across Google, Facebook and Bing are probably the only thing which can keep up with that speed. In the last 3 years the CPC and CPM in most industries on average across all markets I manage for clients have increased by at least 60%.
This is information which no ad network or agency would share with you in their sales materials ( regardless if they even admit it after they get you ). It is scary because even if you as a business owner raise your prices to battle this and the other inflation your customers will have lower purchasing power combined with lower ability from your side to purchase valuable real estate on the web in one way or another. This results in the destruction of small and medium businesses world wide and this is the first reason why you should surround yourself with competent, competitive people.
Follow the advice
There are so many improvements you can do as a business owner if you really listen and follow the guidelines of your marketer. Despite that, I have almost countless stories of business owners when I was working for other companies which despite pretending they care and want to improve and grow their business were flaky when I asked them why nobody in their company did anything about a single super important task I’ve sent to them a month or more ago. Some pretend to be very busy, others show clear surprise when I mention that task because they never read the emails or their employees never mentioned it to them. The best advice is to follow the advice. Mistakes are the growing pains of every company, but not paying attention or freezing because you are scared to invest time and money to improve and issue is wrong. It kills your results, it levels your to the level of you competition and below them, it opens weaknesses in your business which can destroy it in a bad situation and most of the time you are missing on low hanging fruit ( money ). This is your best move, work with people who offer value rather than just facts and numbers and follow their advice.
