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Like any career, digital marketing has its highs and lows with meaningful payoffs and its fair share of annoyances. This week, Genius Monkey is taking a look at some of the most common complaints that marketers have shared about the process of creating and running digital marketing campaigns. We’re not just looking to commiserate; there are steps you can take alleviate or outright solve some of these issues, so let’s jump in:
Constantly Shifting Market Conditions
In today’s always-connected world, social media plays a massive role in shaping consumer behavior. Trends come and go in the blink of an eye, and advertisers must stay on top of these fleeting shifts to remain relevant. Consumer preferences can change faster than you can keep up, making it difficult to craft campaigns that stay in tune with the public’s ever-changing desires.
Beyond what the audience wants, the means by which advertisers send their messages is always evolving. New social media platforms are born and fall away, new inventory opens up as more people embrace OTT/CTV, and new placement and tracking technologies demand constant improvements and adjustments in your campaigns.
What’s the Remedy?
Tastes and tech may change, but there are a few fundamentals that always matter regardless of circumstance. While preparing your campaigns, make sure you’ve got these down:
- The voice of your business
- Prioritizing the user experience
- Diversifying your channels for reaching your customers
No-one can see the future, but anyone can follow the data. Building your campaigns with quality content derived from audience metrics will give you the breathing room to optimize around the latest trends or algorithm changes. Genius Monkey has always called itself a “data-driven platform” because this is exactly what we do: build marketing strategies around what actually works and delivers results.
Getting Stuck on Campaigns
The last thing you want is for potential customers to consider your content “predictable” or “boring.” And yet, many advertisers get caught in the routine of running campaign after campaign after campaign. Many brands will let their marketing strategy lull in between big pushes, which is a great way to let interested customers slip through the cracks.
What is the Remedy?
Brands need a voice and personality if they want their message to stay fresh. Campaigns and events are great, but advertisers can give their voice some depth with steady marketing that diverges from the usual sales pitch.
A great place to start is an evergreen programmatic campaign that educates rather than sells. People get tired of being constantly pitched. Sometimes simply educating them on products, or things they just might need to know goes a long way. Not every customer is looking for a “relationship” with a brand, but it’s important to provide one for those who are ready to give their loyalty. When it comes to building a voice, consistency is key.
Genius Monkey has consistently found that a steady programmatic budget works the best for maximizing market penetration. It gives the platform the flexibility to bid higher when it counts the most, and make every dollar stretch further even in the down-seasons.
Leadership Not Understanding How Marketing Works
In Genius Monkey’s research, this point was often brought up by many disgruntled digital advertisers. Many were frustrated by executive leadership who placed priorities in the wrong places, especially when that meant reducing resources in the name of “efficiency.”
Digital marketing is a relatively young medium that is constantly changing; what used to work well might not be as effective now. There are many examples of leadership focusing too hard on ROAS – a long-standing industry metric – as a measurement of efficiency. It can be especially frustrating when newer, more wide-reaching tools such as MER exist, but management isn’t willing to change their perspective.
Another common issue is leadership forgetting that digital advertising is a process that takes time for the full effect to manifest. Management may approve the use of new mediums like DOOH or CTV, then grow frustrated when the investment doesn’t produce returns right away. Expanding channels and mediums is a great way to increase advertising effectiveness, but the lack of understanding on what each medium is intended to yield can lead to awkward or heated conversations.
What is the Remedy?
First things first, get a clear understanding of what leadership is looking to accomplish with any marketing initiative or campaign. Net it is equally important to set clear expectations on what the medium, campaign, or project will produce in the short, medium and long term. Help educate all team members where there may be a misunderstanding of how a medium is intended to be used (whether it is a branding play vs a conversion play).
Again, your best ally is the data. The more quantitative reports you can present with hard numbers (ROAS, MER, etc.), the more easily you’ll be able to win over the trust of leadership. If you can back up every point you want to make with data, then the higher-ups won’t be able to doubt that you at least know what you’re talking about.
Dwindling Resources
In 2024 alone, over 150,000 tech workers were laid off, and marketing teams are feeling the strain. While digital ad spend continues to rise, overall marketing budgets are shrinking. With smaller teams doing more with less, marketers are struggling to maintain efficiency and effectiveness without sacrificing quality.
What is the Remedy?
The best way to improve efficiency without diminishing quality is to partner with a proven fully managed programmatic platform. A solid platform will expand the reach of your message by placing it in front of your ideal target audience, reducing waste and drastically increasing the odds of conversion.
It also pays to have an expert team backing up the platform. The real-human crew at Genius Monkey has eyes-on and assists with every single user, regardless of campaign or scope. This expertise means advertisers can expand their reach without gigantic budgets or the need to hire more staff just for market research or ad placements.
Such was the case with the Open Lock Marketing Agency. The Open Lock CEO needed to scale into more programmatic, but did not have the team and resources to be able to do so. They turned to a fully managed platform in Genius Monkey to manage all of their campaigns and it saw results overnight. In their video case study she explains how she would never have had the time to be able to do programmatic in a self serve platform. Not only that, her clients saw 56% lower cost per conversions in just weeks.
One for the Team
Partnering with an experienced team can help your business achieve its goals without breaking the bank. Genius Monkey offers the agility and expertise your campaigns need, backed by the data to show leadership that your efforts are delivering results.
Are you ready to increase your conversions and decrease your costs? Get in touch with Genius Monkey to find out how!
