Reasons why most Digital Marketing campaigns fail in Sri Lanka

Reasons why most Digital Marketing campaigns fail in Sri Lanka

Digital marketing is undoubtedly the future for any business to flourish online, however, things will not always go according to the plan. Your Digital marketing campaign might go wrong and create more damage to your business than helping it to grow if you don’t understand the proper ways to do your digital marketing campaign. Especially in a country like Sri Lanka where most of the businesses still believing in traditional marketing and also those who don’t understand the correct concepts of digital marketing may fall into trouble when they try to go digital blindly.

If you are an owner or even a marketing manager/director of a business of any scale and one or more of your marketing campaigns are not doing really well, this article will help you to get your campaign back on the track. Here under this article, we discuss most common reasons why Digital Marketing campaigns fail in Sri Lanka.

1. Believing Digital Marketing is for small businesses

This is a common misconception people have not only in Sri Lanka but in other countries when it comes to social media marketing. If you choose the right channels for your business on social media, it can help your business in many ways regardless of the size of it. Social media or Digital Marketing is not just there to sell your products or services, these platforms can be used as great communication tools to serve your customers faster than ever before. Most of the small businesses benefit from social media because it creates the momentum for those small businesses grows fast with more engagement with their clients, but this doesn’t mean the large organisations can’t get the best out of the strategy. If you align your marketing objectives with digital marketing strategy, then any business will find it useful going digital for lot of reasons apart from just creating leads or sales.

2. Not having a clear objective

KPIs are very important in Digital Marketing to check the performance of your campaigns. It is essential for you to set KPIs for your digital campaigns like you have on offline marketing. If you don’t set KPIs for your Digital campaigns you are not taking the full potential out of the campaign. Unlike traditional marketing where it is hard to measure the success of the campaign, in Digital Marketing you can quantify all the results and it will help you make decisions where your marketing tactic should focus for future campaigns. Here are some of the KPIs you should keep a close eye in your Digital Marketing campaign.

  1. Monthly new leads/prospects
  2. Cost per lead generated and cost per conversion
  3. Monthly website traffic
  4. Bounce rates
  5. Pages per visit
  6. Google PageRank
  7. Click-through rate on PPC advertising
  8. Engagement rate
  9. Number of followers

3. Doing Digital Marketing because the others are doing

This is a major issue in Sri Lankan context which is connected with the reason discussed above. Businesses sometimes do their digital marketing so blindly just to follow the heard and just to create their presence on social media and other platforms sometime even irrelevant to the industry which they operate. This is so common when some businesses operate on Social Media, they don’t have good understanding about which platform can benefit them the most so they try to represent in all social platforms, making the management of these platforms a pain and time-consuming task which eventually will lead to waste of effort and even money feeding the wrong platform which only works as a drain to suck out all the cash you throw in. It is vital for businesses to choose the correct platform and try to create a stronghold on that platform so you build your campaigns around this stronghold which will make it successful. This is one of the reasons to choose a digital marketing agency to help you with your digitisation process.

4. Lack of understanding about competitors

When it comes to online, your competitors will be your best source for information. Unlike offline marketing, your competitors can’t hide a lot from you. So why not take this opportunity to understand what they do online? Analyse the competitors and what they really do on their website, social media and even with their content. You can learn a lot about the market and the environment you operate when you analyse your competitors correctly. Also, this is really a grate opportunity especially for small businesses who don’t have a lot of money to spend on market researches to analyse the market trends and demands. It’s always easy to analyse your competitors and squeeze out all these information from what they do online, you will definitely need good analytical skills to do this but it’s all worth when you want your business to grow fast.

5. Not using modern tools

Doing everything manually is now old school, there are so many tools for you to choose when it comes to automating your online activities. Optimising a website for search engines was a real pain few years back, but now you have a lot of tools to analyse and make quick decisions on what to do with your SEO. This is the same for social media, there are a lot of tools available even for free up to a certain level to automate your campaigns on social media, saving a lot of time for you to focus on other things in business. Also, there are so many tools out there to do social listening if you want to know what people talk about your business on social media, “Mention” is one such tool you can use to get a lot of insights about your brand performance on social media.

6. Not understanding the target audience

Always understand what is the segment you target through your digital marketing campaign, failing to understand what your target audience wants from your business will lead you into huge failures that can make a big impact on the reputation of your business. Always analyze the audience and distribute content they love to engage. More your target audience engage with your content, more you create awareness for your brand and will generate leads towards your business.

7. Not having a good website to capture the full potential

Businesses spend a lot of money on advertising their products and services online, most of these campaigns focus on increasing website traffic. However, if these websites are not helping the digital campaigns to bring the most out of what you spent, you are just wasting money on clicks that don’t generate any leads for you to work on converting. Your website must support all the activities you do online especially with search engine advertisements and social media advertisements. This is the reason why Google has introduced the “Quality score” to the add auction system to give more prominence to the advertisements that give the best landing page experience to their customers. In Sri Lanka, not every business understands the potential of having a good website to operate online. Even if you have a website, it must support the marketing you do online to capture the full potential out by enabling mobile responsiveness, lead capturing methods, conversation analysis, user behavior analysis and even sometimes CRM (Customer Relationship Management) integration to manage the lead conversion effectively. When you choose a web design agency in Sri Lanka to do your website consider these points before awarding your website development project just blindly which will cost you a lot of money in the long run.

Hope you enjoyed reading this article and hope you found the information valuable. Feel free to share this post if you think the information here would help someone you know. If you want to get to know more industry insights and valuable tips on Digital Marketing, please subscribe with our newsletter below (We promise not to overload your inbox with emails).

Subscribe to the newsletter 

Published
Categorized as Blog

By Manik Gunawardana

Founder of Media Horizon and co-founder Colab Media Australia with more than 15 years experience in digital marketing and web development industry helping many brands to be successful online in Australia and Sri Lanka. Specialities: Specialized in digital marketing, project management, web designing/development, email marketing and designing, SEO, Big data & Data Analytics and Augmented & Virtual reality.

Manik-Gunawardana

By Manik Gunawardana

Categorized as Blog

Founder of Media Horizon and co-founder Colab Media Australia with more than 15 years experience in digital marketing and web development industry helping many brands to be successful online in Australia and Sri Lanka. Specialities: Specialized in digital marketing, project management, web designing/development, email marketing and designing, SEO, Big data & Data Analytics and Augmented & Virtual reality.