Is Your Digital Marketing Dead? Bring it Back to Life!

Is your website’s blog a graveyard of year old posts and nothing new going live? Is your most recent Facebook post from the Christmas two years ago? Are you so busy that you haven’t even opened up your Google Analytics to see who is still coming to your website? Do you feel like there is no need to market your business?

If you’ve answered yes to any of the above questions, it’s likely your marketing (and soon your business) is dead as a doornail. But hold off on planning that funeral and digging the grave, it is possible to resurrect it! Through the power of hard work, strategic planning, and the power of science, you can bring it back to life!

The first decision you need to make is whether you should salvage your existing marketing, or just start over. This requires looking into the current state of your marketing and determining if any of it is worth keeping.

Start with your website. Is it a relic from the ’90s? Is the design pretty dated? Are you using marketing strategies from a different decade? Go through and find what could still work for you and what won’t. Maybe your website design is old, but the copy is still persuasive and informative. Identify both strengths and weaknesses.

From there, you can start to make a plan. If you don’t see a lot of value in your current marketing, especially if it’s extremely old, it might be a good idea to just start over. A clean slate can let you focus on making a new site instead of worrying about fixing your old one.

If you see quite a bit of value on your website, don’t let that go to waste. Take what was working, then re-work or throw out what wasn’t. Be cruel when it comes to removing waste or mistakes on the site, and replace it with something better. It’s more than just slapping a new coat of paint on the site, as you are removing and replacing major chunks while keeping the parts that were working for you.

Then, implement this same pattern with other parts of your digital marketing. Analyze your social media, digital ads, blog, and more to decide whether to start over or try to reanimate what you were doing before.

Just like Frankenstein putting life into his creation, it doesn’t happen by accident. You need to make a plan for not just the first step, but how to make sure your marketing is successful in the long term.

That means, like any good mad scientist, you need to do research, experiments, collect data, and create a plan of action. Make sure you have an up-to-date understanding of the current world of digital marketing and how it is impacting your industry.

Making a plan also means understanding your target market. If it’s been years since you last touched your marketing, it’s quite likely your target market has changed. Problems your audience had a few years ago might have been totally eliminated, or shifted into something new. Maybe how they use your product is completely changed and you need to adapt to it.

Once you feel like you have a good understanding of both marketing and your target market, make a marketing plan. Detail out what kind of content you’ll be producing, how it will entice your target market, and how you’ll attract and convert new customers.

Marketing isn’t easy, especially if it’s not your job 100 percent of the time. Going forward, you need to be sure to put extra time, effort, and passion into marketing. Whether that means setting aside time every day to work, or hiring somebody else to handle it, you need to keep up on your marketing for the long term. It’d be pointless to do a bunch of work just to let your marketing die again.

It’s not just planning out time though, you need to be passionate about it too. It’s easy to get burned out on marketing, so staying excited about it is essential for success. Being lazy or stale leads to bad marketing, especially when creating content. Get creative, show your passion for the business, and write directly to your target market. If you find that you are struggling with the desire to do marketing, consider taking a tiny break, hold a brainstorm to come up with new ideas, or try a different aspect of marketing for a bit. The important part is that you don’t just give up.

Often, the first part of marketing that gets put on the back burner or forgotten is social media. In today’s world, you can’t afford to have an out of date or inactive social media profile. Social media acts as the face for your company and lets you stay connected to both customers and potential leads.

If you find that you can’t keep up on all of the multiple social media platforms, consider focusing on one or two. Cut out the platforms that you don’t see much success on and instead plan on growing your more important ones. In today’s world, most of the platforms can accomplish everything you need, it all just depends on where your followers are. For example, don’t worry about posting videos to YouTube if nobody is watching them, instead, post the videos to Instagram’s video platform IGTV if that’s where your followers are.

Failing to keep up on at least one social media platform could lead to losing customers and sales. Many shoppers check out a business’ social media profiles during the buying process, and if you have nothing current, they might assume your business is closed, or not very customer friendly.

Bringing your marketing back to life and seeing significant results is neither going to be quick nor easy. Be prepared to spend a lot of time working on it. There is no quick fix or life hack to get the work done, you just have to do it.

If you personally can’t dedicate enough time to your marketing, hire somebody who can. Frankenstein had an assistant, and you can too. Whether you hire an agency or bring in a part-time marketer, having somebody focused on your marketing can be a huge help. Or, hire somebody to handle other tasks and you focus on the marketing.

Then, once you start to see real results, you too can scream into the night sky “It’s alive!”