Digital Marketing Failure

With the ever-increasing complexity of digital marketing and competition on the Internet, breaking through the information clutter and getting qualified leads and sales is becoming more complicated and expensive.

Millions of marketing dollars are being invested into digital – and when nothing happens, it seems that only Google and Facebook are making money.

The main reasons why digital marketing fails, no matter how much money companies spend, are:

• Buying advertising to send traffic to a useless website
• Hiring a team with inadequate skills and knowledge
• Failing to have a strategic approach
• Corporate analysis paralysis
• Not enough experimentation
• Not performing return-on-investment analysis on a tactical level.
• Premature campaign termination

Even if something worked last year, the Internet’s ever-changing nature makes it difficult for digital marketing teams to standardize the previous winning solutions and reuse the winning models on new missions. With your options running low, you decide to outsource to experts – a digital marketing agency.

Outsourcing to one of the hundreds of new digital marketing agencies being created every day doesn’t help. Marketing agencies ‘ business models are based on assuring their own profitability by hiring employees on fixed salaries and then billing them by the hour. This model assures you do not have top talent working on the campaign. Do you really think that top experts in Google Ads, which are necessary today to bring strong performance, will work for some agency for 1/5th of what they can make if they go freelance or form their own companies? Of course, not – top talent doesn’t work for agencies as agencies can’t afford them.

So, how do you approach this problem and reduce risk and mistakes for your company? The digital marketing industry and the Internet changes rapidly and grows more complex over time. Everyone has different opinions about how to do something right, and these opinions change every year.

You solve it by doing what every other industry did when faced with chaos – you adopt a framework with specific steps to follow. For example, in the world of accounting, chaos is solved with the GAAP framework, which works in the United States, or the IFRS framework, which works in the rest of the world. In the world of programming, every programming language creates order and predictability with its own framework (jQuery, Bootstrap, etc.).

In every industry, you can find a framework. The framework aims to streamline proven processes across businesses and make them more efficient and predictable.

But adopting the marketing framework alone won’t help you if you have semi-talented people executing each step as such a framework will produce mediocre performance. The only way frameworks give you elite performance is if each small step is done by a specialist.

So, what we did at Attention is we outsource each small step to the industry’s top specialist who does only this particular job and has been doing it for years, over and over and over again. The world’s top talent is expensive – they are charging us their “agency discount” rates of $150 per hour. Besides, to secure their resources to make sure they are here for our clients, we buy their time ahead of time – we prepay them to secure their time, attention, and focus.

This is the only way to do it if you want to be on the top. 80% of agencies that do self-PR and tell clients, “we have great talent working here,” “we have the smartest employees,” are talking nonsense as established forces of capitalism are not making this possible. Such agencies (and this is almost 95% of them out there) will always be kicked around and beaten by firms who have our working model and outsource every little step to the best in the world.

High-level of competency for each step is best described by this quote:

I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.

– Bruce Lee

You can’t just outsource to anyone. The moment you don’t outsource to top talent globally, you become worse than the agency with poor full-time talent on board. But how do you outsource to the top of the world. By networking in the industry for 25+ years and aggressively going after the top talent. For example, if a candidate who worked at Facebook and wrote their paid advertising engine leaves Facebook, we go after him, meet with him and make a deal with him to make a couple of bucks from his island in the Caribbean. This is how far you have to go to have excellence.

Over the past 25+ years, we have been developing a proprietary digital strategy framework that brings results, reduces cost, and offers predictability. The system would not have worked if we didn’t have the world’s best talent, and we are grateful to everyone who has helped us.

When all elements are merged, our method reduces the risk in the ever-changing world of digital sales & marketing. Our clients experience satisfying and consistent growth, and many have become a benchmark in their industry on how to use the Internet to grow their sales cost-effectively. The most important thing about the marketing frameworks is that once they are set up, your in-house team can easily operate them and grow your enterprise with in-house employees (eliminating the need for the more expensive outside agency).

We call our method Attention Ecosystem®. The core of our method is a philosophy of excellence. Top 1% of excellence.

We also have a rooted belief that our final deliverable must give companies a sustainable advantage. Sustainable advantage means that marketing systems that generate leads will continue to operate at the least possible cost without needing a digital agency to run it.  If a business implements an Attention Ecosystem® around its core offerings, that business should be self-reliant and not dependent on any digital marketing agency to drive the system forward. As part of this philosophy, after initial setup and training, we offer full training for our clients to continue their success story in-house.

Our method’s success is validated through the fact that all our work has been recorded, and results can be verified through the digital footprint in a major online platform such as Google Analytics, HubSpot, Adobe Analytics, and our client’s public financial statements.

Our methodology has generated billions in sales and shaped the future of dozens of America’s most recognizable brands. Even in the most challenging categories, our clients have experienced transformational growth.