“Observe the masses and do the opposite.”

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If you’re thinking about increasing your company’s digital marketing ad spend, or wondering how to get more bang for your digital marketing buck you might want to read this first.

Below are five well-kept secrets among digital marketing agencies. If I was in your shoes as a CEO or CMO in charge of increasing ROI, I would want to know about them, so here goes:

Digital Marketing Secret #1.

Digital ad fatigue is real, especially post-pandemic. Here’s how to combat it.

The reality of digital marketing in 2022 is that consumers do not blindly absorb content anymore and ‘influencer fatigue’ is growing. In a world of sponsored content; from pregnancy announcements with brand partnerships, tweens promoting makeup, and 15-year-olds promoting arthritic gummies, how do consumers decide what’s authentic and what’s not?

And just how many online ads have you dodged, blocked or deleted today?

As companies were forced to increase their digital presence during the pandemic, competition for attention rose to unprecedented levels. Finding that happy balance between providing consistent and relevant content without overwhelming your target audience is a challenge that every marketing team goes through at some stage.

The solution is greater ad personalization. This means your digital marketing campaigns now need to be micro-segmented instead of just segmented to ensure your prospects and customers are only seeing content and offers that meticulously match with their needs. Standard customer segmentation is no longer enough.

Digital Marketing Secret #2.

Digital marketing continues to convert at substantially lower rates than traditional print media (especially direct mail). Solution - combine both for maximum response.

Digital ads are cheap, virtually instant and can be quickly modified depending on response rates. But, as you know competition is fierce, attention spans are short and even five minutes later after someone clicks your ads, chances are they’ve already moved on, distracted by a trending viral video.

If you’ve ever struggled to have people show up for your sales webinars, this is probably also the reason.

Once again, hyper-personalization – preferably using some form of direct mail as an instant follow up to a digital campaign – is the solution.

Wait, digital advertising that combines direct mail?

Contrary to popular belief direct mail is not dead.

As mail volumes in the U.S. decline year after year, direct mail response rates climb. From 2006 to 2020, mail volume dropped 50%. During the same period, however, direct mail response rates skyrocketed. From 2006 to the present, house list response rates grew by 173% while prospect lists enjoyed a 194% bump.

How does that compare to digital?

Email, paid search, and social media averages a 1% return, while display ads average a response rate of 0.3%. While digital may be great for remarketing and getting people to engage with your brand, it’s clear that direct mail is better at driving new and returning business.

Combine digital and print for the highest conversion rates

Using direct mail as part of an omnichannel marketing strategy can also improve response rates. According to a study conducted by the CMO Council, campaigns that paired direct mail with digital ads saw 118% higher response rates than those that only used direct mail, and 385% higher than those that only used digital .

This may sound surprising, but it’s consistent with what we see in the marketplace.

Digital Marketing Secret #3.

Investing in your brand is far more important than you might realize

Airbnb cut $800 million in ad spending in 2020. Brian Chesky, CEO, said this “What the pandemic showed is we can take [digital] marketing down to zero and still have 95% of the same traffic as the year before. So we’re not going to forget that lesson. [We were focusing on the wrong] KPI which was just about how do you buy cheaper media …In Q4, more than 90% of our traffic was direct or unpaid. Accordingly, [there will be] a permanent shift to brand [advertising.]”

Adidas came to the same conclusion - they were so focused on short-term digital “performance” metrics that they underinvested in longer-term brand building. “The problem ... is not the metrics per se but a focus on the wrong metrics. Digital technology offers a wealth of short-term measurements, often in real time, which has resulted in marketing investment being misdirected. Brand is driving 65% of our sales across wholesale, retail and e-commerce, and yet [at 55% of investment] it has an under investment. We [were] overly focused on digital attribution and digital sales but we are improving,” said the sports brand’s global media director, Simon Peel.

The key takeaways are these: It’s not that you should turn off digital ad spending (that would not be wise unless your company’s brand is as widely known as AirBNB’s), but that you can invest it differently and get far superior outcomes.

Airbnb was focused on the wrong digital marketing KPIs, by focusing on how to buy cheaper media which, ironically were disguised as “performance metrics.”

The second key takeaway is performance vs brand. In digital, there may appear to be performance — e.g. more clicks — but often there are few to no incremental sales or key business outcomes. Some of this is due to clicks coming from bots and not humans… which brings us to the next digital marketing secret.

Digital Marketing Secret #4.

Ad impressions are the worst marketing metric to measure success against.

On doing a marketing audit for a new client, we once found an ad campaign that was getting over a million ad impressions a day (in normal speak impressions means pairs of eyeballs – or bots depending on who is running your ads). Yet the conversion rate – the number of people who actually called from the ad - was less than 1%. When we asked our client why they were continuing to plow money into a campaign that was getting such a poor conversion, their response was “because every week millions of people see our ads!

Seeing is not the same as buying.

Digital marketing is all about the QUALITY of your leads, not the quantity. Don’t be impressed by “fluff metrics” that don’t have any real meaning to your bottom line.

Digital Marketing Secret #5.

Don’t pay your digital marketing agency based on your ad spend

That’s like letting the fox run the hen house. A monthly marketing fee plus your ad spend is far more effective and transparent, and gives you cleaner metrics.

And don’t be afraid to ask the hard question - if your agency is earning a commission from the media companies you happen to be advertising on. That’s another red flag because it means they’re married to specific media which may or may not be in your best interests to be advertising on.

In conclusion

The pandemic has changed the digital marketing playbook for good. Increase your marketing ROI by using any of these five strategies in your company to get more out of your digital marketing budget and makes your sales department happy.