Do you have what it takes to succeed with digital marketing? With an average annual growth of 5.6%, the digital economy is showing no signs of slowing down. That means you’re going to have a lot of competition to face.
The digital marketing mindset required to succeed must include patience, persistence, continued education and constant analyzation and optimization of campaigns.
So what do you do? Do you specialize, or do you go broad? Since digital marketing can encompass many things, you need to have the right mindset to tackle this giant beast.
Without it, failure is practically guaranteed.
Below are six digital marketing mindsets you need to have to set you apart from the rest of the competition.
Adapting to changes
Technological assets don’t usually have a long lifecycle. The general idea is that it would only last on average, about five years. This necessitates companies to manage their hardware and software – to track operations and ensure it’s updated or replaced when required.
It’s the same outlook you should have for digital marketing in your business. To market online effectively, you have to keep up with the trends, adapt to changing technologies, and the ever-changing algorithms.
Finding new ways to reach your target audience
The global average Internet penetration has increased by 24% since 2013.
And with more companies entering the foray of online marketing, reaching your audience is about being innovative, creative, and being able to understand what the market wants through research.
For example, with more people using social media, some digital marketing companies have employed the use of chatbots to improve customer support.
These AI-powered bots can respond to questions quickly, execute tasks around the clock, and create personalized customer experiences.
And the usage doesn’t stop there.
Ticket-based support systems nowadays are supported by AI chatbots.
They help the staff to focus on other more complex and non-repetitive issues, increasing productivity and customer satisfaction.
Reevaluate marketing effectiveness
After the whole process, the primary goal of digital marketing is for your target audience to take action on your content.
Whether from clicking your ads, liking your social posts, or signing up for your newsletter, evaluating and tweaking your copy is a continuous process.
Making changes when something is not working works towards your goal. So it’s essential to know your goals, and if your digital marketing strategies are not hitting them, then drop it and try something else.
The faster you can pivot through these campaigns to find the winning ones will result in quicker positive results.
By adapting to changes, you can face challenges and unfavorable circumstances head-on, enabling you to stay competitive in the digital economy.
This will allow you to increase your website’s traffic, get more customers, and build brand loyalty.
Keep on learning
Digital marketing is ever-changing. What used to work five years ago may not be as effective today when it comes to marketing strategies.
Previously, keyword stuffing was the norm for SEO’s, and marketers obsessed over achieving a certain level of keyword density in their content.
That is no longer the case nowadays because of relevancy and authority matter more when it comes to ranking sites.
Tactics will change
Just look at how fast social media platforms change, whether it’s to please shareholders and increase profits by showing more ads, or changing how and what a user sees in their feeds.
A drastic algorithm shift can alter how you market and engage with your clients.
With digital marketing, your services and skills need to reflect the current times, or you’ll end up with mediocre results or some irate clients.
Tools can become obsolete
Digital marketing has its fair share of products and services that cater to the b2b market.
Since you’ll probably end up using some of these products as well, it’s essential to evaluate the longevity and usefulness of the available features.
You should be aware of the people behind the tools and services that you’re using. It’s not uncommon to use something for a couple of months, then suddenly, the product or service stops working.
On top of that, the developer goes missing.
One example of this is with WordPress Plugins. You can add a plugin that is highly recommended and has excellent reviews.
Then one day months or even years later, you run into functionality problems with your website.
After troubleshooting, you will see that this once great plugin hasn’t been updated since the last three versions of WordPress and is now incompatible.
Picking the right tools and services that best complement your business in terms of functionality, price, user experience, and integration is essential for digital marketing.
Invest in your education
Technology can be very intimidating. You might think that you already nailed down one method.
Still, then you realize another three objectives need to be implemented to make the strategy work.
So how do you keep up?
As with most worthwhile things in life, you should never stop learning. Reading blogs and industry-specific magazines are a start.
But you should take a few steps further by browsing sites like Udemy and Skillshare.
Find online courses that can further your digital marketing education and put in the time to learn.
Companies like Ahref, who do content marketing with their helpful SEO videos, is another way to learn for free. You can find whole playlists of digital marketing tips and tactics by viewing their channel alone.
If you feel you’re up to it. Get certified.
There are free and paid digital marketing certifications in various areas of specialization that you can do online. You get to practice as you learn and, at the end of it, be recognized as an industry expert – which will help with credibility.
My personal favorite is finding mentors. Not necessarily someone whom you can work with hands-on but someone who is accomplishing the things you want to achieve.
Consume all their online content, buy their books, and get their courses if they offer them.
For example, Ryan Biddulph from Blogging From Paradise has been blogging for years and is widely respected in the online space.
I have consumed a lot of his content, and when I was ready to sharpen my skills on guest blogging, I move to the next level and purchased his eBook on the topic.
There is a lot of information out there, and if you are not careful, you could be mislead.
So, finding a mentor can be an essential way to cut through all the noise.
Use reliable data to make decisions
Digital marketing is not a guessing game. But many people make decisions based on what they assume their audience wants.
There are clear metrics that you can measure to create the right response after you deploy a strategy.
This is the only way to have tangible evidence on what works and what doesn’t, which would save you months of your time and money from ineffective results.
For you to gain meaningful data, you need to have a few tools in your arsenal. This can include the following:
Comprehensive SEO data
Tools like SEMrush are useful for a lot of digital marketing related tasks. But most marketers use it to improve their SEO campaigns.
Keyword research and finding trending topics is a significant component of SEO, and SEMrush helps you do that.
It’s not limited to just that though, think of it as the Swiss-army knife of SEO tools.
If you need to rank better in the search engines and find new data for SEO opportunities, then SEMrush is for you.
Other notable alternatives are Ahref, Serpstat, and Moz.
Email marketing to gauge response rate
Email marketing is more than just a tool to communicate with your audience.
It can be used to measure response rates from your headlines, your email copy, and your various content.
You can integrate a shopping cart with it and conduct retargeting campaigns with your newsletters, among other things.
By measuring your open and click-through rates, you can gain insight into what interests your audiences.
This data can be used not just for crafting better emails but can be used to create other forms of content as well.
Most people check their inboxes at least once a day.
So by knowing how they react to your email messages, you can form strategies that cater to your audience’s wants and needs.
Once you build a loyal list of subscribers, you’d be amazed at how much knowledge you get by just asking them the right questions.
A popular email marketing solution is MailChimp and GetResponse. MailChimp is excellent for beginners with its free plan up to a certain number of subscribers.
Using data from paid social media campaigns
Everybody is on social media. And forgetting privacy issues for a moment, that means these giant platforms have a ton of information on their users.
By doing paid social media advertising, you can get a wealth of information on your target audience. This gives you stats on your ad performance, which translates into better marketing and attributions data.
To get started, you don’t even need third-party tools. Just use Facebook’s own Power Editor to manage your ads. You can target exactly the audience you want and save these as Saved Audiences for later use.
When you can accurately measure your key performance indicators or KPIs, you can evaluate and adapt your social media efforts to make the most impact on your audience.
The importance of perseverance and persistence
You’ve analyzed all the data and taken all the necessary steps for your digital marketing campaigns. Now you want to see the results of your efforts.
But it’s not going exactly the way you expect. Or you do not see the results you thought you’d get by now. So what do you do? Give up your online marketing dream or continue?
As with most things in life, perseverance and persistence are what’s needed to succeed.
Staying strong amidst setbacks and unforeseen outcomes is crucial; some would even argue it comes before everything else.
So it’s vital to have a strong and ‘technical’ mind at the same time as you are unlikely to succeed with one without having the other.
Some results are beyond your control
Even after the right attitude and mindset, you’ll still have to be patient to see results.
It’s like hitting a baseball; you can only control your stance and how you hit the ball, but not exactly where the ball will go once the bat makes contact the majority of the time.
The same holds true with digital marketing. You need time to build an audience and gain trust; positioning your brand will take multiple campaigns. Your SEO efforts will likely see organic results after at least six months to a year.
Therefore, it’s ideal for focusing your efforts on what you can control. Look over your marketing copy, can you improve your headlines, so it gets more clicks?
Try to enhance its relevance to your audience by making it more engaging and updated.
You can scrutinize the quality of your videos. Do they have the proper lighting?
Are you using the right video scripts that make your audience subscribe to your channel and hitting that Like button?
Asking these types of questions in your digital marketing will help refocus your efforts in the right direction.
On the flip side, obsessing over vanity metrics over actionable metrics won’t do you any good. And for organic search results, it will stress you out trying to keep up with every single update.
Forget how your competitors are doing; you’ll catch up to them eventually.
When it comes to making decisions, taking the long view, and making small, calculated steps goes a long way.
You should plan and prepare, but perseverance and persistence win the battle.
Sticking with what works
Don’t reinvent the wheel. Being successful with digital marketing is about focusing on what works and ditching the rest.
It’s the Pareto Principle – 80% of your results should come from 20% of your efforts.
So if you find that a particular type of content resonates well with your audiences, improve and create more of the same.
You might discover that a category on your blog gets the most comments.
If so, keep on creating more posts in that category, improve the visual elements, and make it a sticky post if it’s evergreen content.
Not only do you increase the relevancy of your content for the search engines, but you encourage repeat traffic from website visitors as well.
Another thing you could do is repurpose your most popular content into other types of media.
You can turn a popular post into an infographic and submit it to websites like Visual.ly or Slideshare. Or use the content and create videos and send it to YouTube and Vimeo.
It takes a lot less effort to repurpose content than to create one from scratch. By doing this, you can reach new audiences and double or triple your results.
Don’t get caught up with the infamous ‘chasing shiny object syndrome.’ There will be a time and a place to broaden your marketing scope.
Focusing on what works not only allows for tangible results but prevents you from straying from your core marketing strategy.
Appreciate the successes you’ve achieved
I know you heard this at least one thousand times already.
Rome wasn’t built in a day! And the same goes for your digital presence.
Regardless of the size of your company, if you are an established solopreneur or just starting out, there will be small and big wins that you should care about.
Maybe you’ve reached your first 1000 subscribers. Or you managed to get a lot of replies when you gave your email list a free training course you just created.
Appreciating the small wins is just as important as celebrating the big ones.
The significant strides that you achieve with your digital marketing efforts probably would not have happened if you didn’t build on the smaller results first.
With digital marketing, your results can have a snowball effect. We all know how small a snowball is before it turns into a giant rolling down a hill.
And that’s how you should view your successes.
Final Thoughts
Digital marketing is a complicated, challenging, but ultimately rewarding endeavor. You need to have hard and soft skills to succeed.
And being able to adapt to changes while learning and persevering will make you a more effective digital marketer.
So go out there and make it happen!
