Is your digital marketing stagnant? Are there budget cuts coming? Is your company not growing or not growing fast enough?

If you answered yes, there are five tell-tale warning signs.

These digital marketing red flags show that your marketing strategy is ineffective and not producing bottom-line results.

Let’s discuss your digital marketing strategy and some digital marketing red flags on why it is not working.

There are many possibilities for why your digital marketing strategy is underperforming. It’s important to identify the holes in your existing strategy so you can ensure its success.

Certain digital marketing red flags or warning signs may appear. You should pay attention to these when developing and implementing your strategy.

By identifying your weaknesses and making some tweaks, you can see the results your company want from marketing.

Between all the various digital marketing tools, it seems nearly impossible to tell why your marketing strategy isn’t working. Determining where your marketing needs to change isn’t simple.

There could be many holes in your existing digital marketing strategy and plan. You may see revenue coming into your company, but you don’t know how much marketing influenced that revenue.

Do you know if your digital marketing efforts directly impact and influence your revenue growth?

And is your team continuously demonstrating the value of marketing?

For example, some companies struggle to communicate their digital marketing strategy.

5 digital marketing red flags to watch for

We are going to explore the red flags of digital marketing. These are key warning signs that your strategy is not working.

We will discuss what you can do about it. We will offer some relevant and actionable suggestions. These suggestions can give your digital marketing strategy a makeover.

1. You are not concentrating on lead generation enough

The first place to start is to find out what your sales team thinks of your digital marketing efforts.

Your sales team is always looking for more leads, especially from marketing.

They may not say this, but it’s an important truth and fact.

Leads are where most friction happens between sales and marketing departments.

Salespeople rely on their commission checks. If new business does not come in, it will impact their “take-home” pay.

The sales team is “coin-operated” because they are compensated for the number of products and services they sell.

Most marketing departments are not incentivized for the number and the quality of leads they pass to the sales team.

If there is not a steady flow of leads from marketing to sales, problems might occur. This could lead to tension between the two groups.

A consistent transfer of leads from marketing to sales is essential. Without it, tension could arise between the two groups.

This is particularly relevant in the business-to-business (B2B) world. Sometimes, this friction occurs between marketing and the inside sales team.

Think of inside sales as the sales qualification arm of the field or outside sales team.

The lack of trust

Sales will not trust marketing if leads do not consistently flow from marketing to sales.

Why?

Inside sales and outside sales teams will feel they are doing most of the work.

Sales will think marketing isn’t delivering its part of the arrangement.

15% of salespeople say that they need “more leads.”

Most salespeople say they need better-quality leads from their marketing team.

Producing better-quality leads requires successful collaboration between the two departments.

Salespeople may have a history and a deep-seated belief based on their experiences at past companies.

They may think that marketing is not concerned enough with leads.

Everything comes back to leads.

Obtaining leads is the core function of the marketing team.

If it is not, you have a problem.

Marketing has to overcome a perception problem.

Many people believe marketing is only concerned with vanity metrics and they are the “creative” team.

Perception becomes a reality.

This results in sales not getting the leads they need from marketing to be successful.

The Demand Waterfall

In the B2B world, most companies use the Demand Waterfall to describe and measure their lead-to-revenue marketing and sales funnel.

It is a popular framework for achieving alignment between marketing and sales. The demand waterfall also brings consistency to the demand management process.

The Demand Waterfall defines key stages and interaction points in the lead management process.

It enables marketing and sales teams to track leads, improve processes, and drive increased revenue growth.

If you don’t have this framework or something similar in place, you have a problem.

Establish a mature lead generation process.

Lead generation, distilled to its simplest essence, is locating and identifying potential customers.

This may sound simple, but it is hard to implement. The process can take a while because it has many touchpoints.

It starts by generating leads. Then, it moves to qualification through lead scoring, and the inside sales team qualifies individually.

Finally, outside sales confirms the qualification with the lead.

It will take many forms, and marketing and sales will experience ups and downs.

A mature lead generation process takes time to set up correctly. It requires many marketing and sales channels.

Successful collaboration between marketing and sales is also necessary.

The payoff of an established and formal lead generation process results in higher revenue with more velocity.

B2B companies with a mature lead generation process generate 133% more revenue than those without.

Establishing a lead generation process requires commitment, investment, and dedication from marketing leaders, sales leaders, and the C-suite.

How to concentrate more on lead generation

Beyond the Demand Waterfall, where do one start? Here are three tips.

Concentrate on thought leadership.

Trust is critical to shaping your company’s brand perception and a buyer’s confidence in working with your organization today.

Authentic thought leadership is one major driver of this trust, where your company’s expertise is sought and rewarded.

Marketers can use thought leadership to build meaningful relationships with customers and prospects.

However, the actual value of thought leadership is often overlooked and rarely measured.

Research from Edelman and LinkedIn found most marketers significantly undervalue the power of thought leadership. This impacts their demand and lead generation efforts.

Evaluate and adjust team resources to generate leads

A major hurdle for most marketing teams is the lack of resources. This challenge affects their ability to execute successful lead generation.

61% of marketers say a lack of staff, funding, and time is their most significant barrier to lead generation.

With limited resources, it’s crucial to concentrate on what’s working to generate leads.

Business (B2B) marketing leaders report that the following approaches work for them:

Establish a benchmark of where you are today

It’s essential to take a snapshot of your current state.

What are your current data points? What does your current lead generation process look like?

Use this initial “point in time” to establish your baseline. This way, you can measure the effectiveness of future marketing and sales initiatives. You can also figure out their success. 

You’ll need a way to determine what’s driving your revenue numbers, so you should be asking yourself questions such as:

• How many leads are we generating each month?
• What marketing channels produce the most leads and the highest quality of leads?
• How many marketing-generated leads (MGLs) become marketing-qualified leads (MQLs)?
• What is the number of MQLs that turned in sales qualified leads (SQLs)?
• Do we need to tweak our lead scoring to ensure a consistent flow of MQLs?
• How many MQLs were kicked back from sales because they weren’t the right company or right contact?
• Based on your SQLs, how many turned into opportunities?
• Of those opportunities, how many did you win, lose, and turn into customers?
• Which marketing channels are yielding the best results?
• Which part of this lead generation management process needs to be improved?

Once you know the answers to these questions, you can evaluate your performance consistently and regularly.

You’ll be able to address marketing channels, approaches, and processes proactively.

You will also identify gaps and tweaks needed for your lead generation efforts.

2. Marketing is not aligned with sales

Sales and marketing alignment can help your company become 67% better at closing deals.

This collaboration can transform your business and improve your bottom line, increasing revenue by 209%.

If marketing and sales teams are misaligned, it could spell disaster. Both teams have the same goal of driving sales and revenue, so they must be in sync.

It doesn’t help that 60-70% of content produced by B2B companies go unused. Additionally, 79% of marketing leads never convert into sales due to a lack of lead nurturing.

Common barriers between marketing and sales (and how to fix them)

Fewer than half of marketers would describe their sales and marketing teams as aligned.

Here are some common barriers that keep marketing and sales from being aligned.

Competing goals and priorities

If you speak to most marketing and sales departments, they feel they have different goals.

Salespeople think marketing’s only job is leads, while marketers want salespeople to stick to the script.

To ensure both marketing and sales have the same goals and priorities, align their objectives carefully.

First, consider making your marketing team responsible for the lead-to-opportunity conversion rate.

If there are not many qualified leads, marketing can see a problem and not blame sales.

The sales team must provide feedback on lead quantity and quality consistently. This practice helps the marketing team refine processes and strategies.

Lack or unclear communication

When the sales team closes a big deal, they’ll often celebrate as though they won it all alone. Sales may forget that marketing created qualified leads for sales.

Also, if marketing produces many leads for sales, sales will complain that the leads aren’t any good.

If marketing hands off higher-quality leads, sales will say there are insufficient leads.

This back-and-forth is why an internal service level agreement (SLA) between marketing and sales should exist.

It ensures everyone is on the same page.

An SLA is an agreement on what services one department will deliver to another.

Keeping each other in the loop

Marketing may not be involved in sales meetings and decisions. They don’t know what sales needs are and how to help sales meet their goals.

Marketing may create campaigns and let sales know at the last minute.

When sales and marketing continue to work in silos without telling the other team, they both suffer. They don’t jointly see the customer journey as a holistic picture.

Feedback helps both teams do their jobs better. Make sure you meet regularly and communicate.

When sales and marketing don’t talk, it’s not that they’re doing it intentionally.

It’s often based on a lack of time. Make time to keep each other in the loop.

Not thinking like each other.

Marketers often think the sales team is using the technology available to help sell to prospects.

Salespeople should think more like marketers and use social media to connect with tech-savvy prospects.

Salespeople often think the marketing team is responsible for brand awareness and vanity metrics. Marketing should be measured by its ability to drive growth.

Setting up an attribution reporting framework is essential.

You should also have a marketing automation system like HubSpot.

This must be well integrated with your customer relationship management (CRM) system, such as Salesforce.com.

Lack of content curation

You can create the social selling curation dream team if you can bring the marketing and sales teams together.

Both teams want to keep clients and prospects engaged and move through the funnel.

Content curation for social selling is a shared activity that aligns sales and marketing.

Marketing teams can find and recommend content for sales teams. They can use curated content as a source of inspiration for new, original content.

Curation should be a part of the overall content marketing strategy.

It reduces the pressure to create new content and provides ideas for future blog articles or posts and original content.

Collaboration on content creation

The sales team must be brought into the content creation stage, where content is developed with marketing’s editorial plan.

Your sales and marketing teams must collaborate for your content to be useful.

It’s also important to share the results of your content marketing efforts with sales.

It could be as simple as creating a monthly content marketing return on investment (ROI).

Reporting and analysis

Do marketing and sales track and measure the same things? Are they learning from each other in their analysis?

It’s essential for marketing and sales to learn from each other. When looking at the numbers, do they know what’s working and what’s not?

A centralized location for resources

Marketers work hard to create marketing and sales resources such as brochures, fact sheets, company overviews, and presentations.

All this content goes to waste if sales can’t find and use it. It’s important to keep marketing and sales resources in one location so sales can easily access them.

3. You don’t show up on page 1 of Google

People use search engines like Google to find information every day.

If people can’t find your website on Google, you miss out on potential customers.

81% of people perform some online research before making a large purchase. Is your website helping Google help its search engine users? If so, Google will reward you with more traffic.

Your website is a living and breathing thing. Every update you make to your website helps Google understand how visitors interact with your website.

Your company must show up on page 1 of Google for specific keywords.

More than 200 ranking factors impact your position on Google, and they’re constantly changing. This fact makes things like latent semantic indexing (LSI) keywords more important.

Let’s dive into what Google really cares about and how you can show up on page 1 of Google.

The number 1 goal of Google

It starts with understanding that Google has one goal: accomplishing searcher tasks. Google learns each time a user searches via Google.

They want to give each searcher answers to their question(s) as soon as possible. They will reward websites that quickly help the needs of their searchers.

Google is trying to go above and beyond to address a searcher’s initial question and anticipate what questions may follow.

In other words, they want their searchers to accomplish their search task.

Position 1 is no longer the holy grail of SEO

Google wants to provide accurate and relevant information for your search queries in the shortest amount of time.

This has led to position 0 and featured snippets. These are zero-click searches, which refer to search results that appear at the top of the first search engine results page (SERP).

These featured snippets appear above the normal search results, which is why they are called position 0. They fall above position 1.

They answer queries in search, allowing users to find relevant information without further clicks.

According to SparkToro, 50.33% of all searches are zero-click searches. This means that more than half of all Google searches now result in no click.

Additionally, a survey by HubSpot reveals that 51.47% of users believe that zero-click searches will help them find information more easily.

Google aims to eliminate multiple Google search results that don’t satisfy the user.

The rise of pinball searches

As a result of Google’s featured snippets, knowledge panels, local rankings, and other new elements are changing searchers’ behavior.

We now search in a “pinball” pattern.

A study by the Nielsen Norman Group shows SERPs’ visual weight, which influences how users view the results.

The study says that since the number of Google features varies from query to query, the gaze pattern is nonlinear.

Answer questions searchers are asking

What does this all mean? It’s simple. The secret to SEO is to answer questions with your content quickly.

It would help if you followed Marcus Sheridan’s example. He was one of the earlier adopters of content marketing. He is known for his revolutionary marketing strategy of answering his customers’ questions.

Not concentrating on the Big 5

According to Marcus Sheridan, five article topics consistently outperform the rest. They drive the most traffic, leads, and sales.

He calls them the Big 5 blog article topics.

They are:

Every business should write about these topics. They will help you answer the critical questions your potential customers are asking Google.

This information is suitable for organic search results. However, you may say, “We can show up on page 1 with pay-per-click (PPC) ads.”

Quick wins through PPC

PPC ads can be a great way to reach page 1 of Google, but they can be expensive.

You have to pay for each ad click. Therefore, bidding only on relevant keywords is critical. Your potential customers can use many keywords.

Companies see poor results from PPC ads for several reasons. The targeting is off. Searchers aren’t converting. The cost per click (CPC) is too high.

For example, CPCs can get extremely high in specific industries.

You may get some quick wins through PPC. However, it’s not a long-term solution for appearing on page 1 of Google.

The holy grail for appearing on page 1 of Google is to rank highly on both paid search result pages. It’s also essential to rank highly on organic search result pages.

4. Marketing and sales are not empowered with clean and actionable data

Data quality is one of the biggest challenges facing businesses today.

In fact, according to ZoomInfo, 62% of companies rely on marketing and prospect data, which is up to 40% inaccurate. Additionally, 25% of B2B databases are inaccurate.

Moreover, 64% of successful data-driven marketers say data quality is one of the most challenging obstacles to success.

It comes down to dirty data.

Are you cleaning your data?

Data quality is crucial for the effectiveness of marketing and sales efforts.

Bad data leads to poor marketing and sales decisions. This problem impacts nearly every business today.

The cleaner the data, the more accurate your digital marketing strategy.

Clean data helps you integrate your plan with your company’s sales team and other departments.

When teams work on different data sets, they can create strategies. They make decisions with incomplete information and a fragmented view.

Arm your team with data.

A marketing leader’s role is to create an effective marketing plan. This plan must be relevant and strategic and align with the company’s revenue and sales goals.

This process starts with putting clean data in the hands of marketing team members and salespeople.

They are on the frontlines. This helps them significantly improve their productivity and quality of work.

A recent report from Harvard Business Review shows the power of putting data analytics in workers’ hands.

In fact, 87% of respondents said their organizations would be more successful. Success increases when workers have access to data and tools.

This access helps them make decisions in the moment.

These employees must be trained to act on these insights. Empowering your team with data separates an excellent marketing department from an average one. It can make or break your digital marketing strategy.

5. Marketing leaders are not clearly articulating the digital marketing strategy and plan

Marketers should continually demonstrate and communicate the value they deliver to the company.

It is one of the digital marketing red flags if your company is not hitting its revenue targets.

Not understanding the value of every marketing investment also signifies that digital marketing needs some changes.

If you spend money on digital marketing, ensure you deliver real results. These results should move the needle for your organization.

You can produce results even on a shoestring budget. If your company doesn’t understand the value of digital marketing, it’s a red flag.

This brings us to an important point.

Are your marketing leaders having trouble articulating your digital marketing strategy in a simple, straightforward, and memorable way?

With all the work you put in, it’s important to effectively communicate your digital marketing strategy and plan.

Describing digital marketing in plain English

Can you verbalize the data in plain English so your mom or dad can understand it?

If you have trouble describing how marketing provides value using standard metrics, you need to rethink your communication strategy. These metrics include ROI, customer lifetime value (CLV), and net promoter score (NPS). Effectively using these metrics is essential.

A successful digital marketing strategy is simple and effective.

Clearly and concisely communicating a digital marketing strategy and plan is just as important as creating it.

Let’s face it: Everyone thinks they are marketing experts and knows what the marketing department should be doing.

But do they truly understand marketing and how it helps your company?

If marketing doesn’t communicate this well, it risks not delivering on the company’s goals.

It can slow progress, prevent the business from profitably delivering on its value proposition, and stunt the business’s growth.

With more CMOs being elevated to chief executive officer (CEO) roles, marketing needs buy-in from all business lines.

It’s essential to transition from plan to execution smoothly.

Marketing should lead the company toward growth.

If you can’t explain the value of marketing in simple terms, it’s probably too complicated.

Bringing it all together on digital marketing red flags

These five red flags or warning signs can help you understand if your digital marketing is not working.

They will help you critically examine your digital marketing efforts and reexamine how best to proceed.

With some simple yet effective changes, you can overcome the challenges and barriers that arise with digital marketing.

Identify the areas of opportunity.

Then realign and optimize so your marketing team can achieve long-term success. It’s essential to recognize the digital marketing red flags early.

This allows you to adjust accordingly and produce the results your company wants from marketing.

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