Digital Marketing & Stages of Denial

When it comes to using digital marketing to grow a business and increase profits, there is sadly more misinformation than there is accurate, helpful information for business owners and entrepreneurs to research.

That misinformation, which actually is nothing more than marketing collateral masquerading as objective information, informs business owners that anyone can create a free DIY generic template and immediately start attracting new customers.

On the other side of the equation are freelancers hungry to pay their rent and put food on the table, so will happily give business owners exactly what they look for: a cheap generic DIY template.

Then the freelancer must move on to the next quick flip in hopes of earning enough to keep their lights on and try to save for yet another rainy season around the bend.

One seldom-spoken of obstacle that business owners regulary face in utilizing effective digital marketing is denial.

Denial is an ugly adjective but one that rears its head daily if you work in digital marketing. It manifests itself in the form of clients who expect digital marketing budgets to be less than what it would cost them to put an ad in a local newspaper (although that advertising medium has no Returns On Investment compared to digital marketing) or who don't see digital marketing as capable of achieving any long-term business objectives.

This denial can be identified first and then resolved secondarily by acknowledgement and self-education on what budgets realistically should be and why.

Next the business owner can self-educate on what SEO is, how it works, why you should use it, how content marketing works in tandem with SEO and content repurposing, how digital marketing projects are responsibly developed, and the value of working from a deliberate organized approach.

When business owners see digital marketing as an ongoing service rather than a "one and done" item, they can begin to overcome denial as to its value and see it as an enterprise-level means by which they can dramatically expand their reach online and increase their bottom-line ROI and overall growth in both online and offline worlds.

Conversely, when digital marketers stop selling services as items and learn to communicate with business owners in terms of desired value and outcomes they want to reach and see digital marketing as a holistic way to help them reach those goals and outcomes, then they can deliver higher value work that can last as long as the internet itself.