Importance of Patience in Digital Marketing
Agencies often come across situations where it appears like digital marketing is not influencing their client’s business directly or simply their bottom line in particular. When this happens, the first idea that pops up in their minds is to change the complete strategy or perhaps hunt through LinkedIn to find a digital marketing sorcerer with the superpowers of bringing overnight success that one can only daydream about. However, there is also a third thing that probably occurs in the minds of a few marketers only – patience. This typically forgotten virtue plays such an essential role in digital marketing.
While you and your team might be pretty confident with your solid strategy, but the client wants to see rapid results, as a marketer, sometimes you will have to step up and have the frightening, rather uncomfortable conversation about keeping patience.
The truth is, the more expeditious and smarter marketing gets, the more patience has to be kept to become successful. However, having the patience to accomplish long-term marketing goals isn’t an easy achievement. The majority of marketers on the client-facing side are aware of the fact that patience is scarce.
In this blog, we will discuss how and why patience is a necessity in digital marketing. Before any delay, let’s dive into the details.
The Journey
Focusing on the end goals of our clients does not mean we should stop considering the objectives. The journey we start in order to achieve a major success for our client means making an effort to measure every small accomplishment and milestone. Determining objectives for both short-term as well as long-term desired results is a great way to find out what is working and what is not within your strategy. This lets you tweak whenever and wherever required while allowing your client to keep their eyes on the reward. Being a digital marketing leader today feels no less than surfing a wave. It is part of our job to help our clients catch the wave and savor this ride leading to success. Now, in the process, wipeouts and undercurrents are inevitable, but being patient is worth it because hey, what feels better than riding a wave after all?
Creating Relationships
Every digital marketing platform brings forth new learning curves at each step of the journey that we just can’t pass over. Through each of these platforms, we endeavor to create personal relationships with the community members present there. As humans, we already know that in relationships, we encounter several things that further contribute to their future, good or bad. The same goes for the relationships that digital marketers develop with social communities for their clients. Now, as the clients’ businesses start growing digitally, you will encounter jolts that will trip your efforts. It’s not the decisions that led us to these jolts that will determine our success but how we respond to them.
Negative comments, reviews, feedback, etc. are not new; all we need to do is have the right attitude in our response to them. Rather than deleting and blocking like humans typically do in their personal relationships, we need to address them properly. Overcoming these challenges will exhibit more of the brand’s ethics to its audiences.
Patience and Consistency Go Hand-in-Hand
Having patience does not mean leaving things up to the universe to drive growth and accomplish our digital marketing platforms’ goals. Keeping patience means we endeavor to achieve over and over again with the planned strategy instead of allowing the complications to stop us from producing and sharing unique content via our client’s brand. Remember, consistency is the key. Therefore we must maintain the quantity as well as the quality of the content to ensure that our client’s audiences see their brand as a credible source.
It Takes Time
Digital marketers need to understand the fact that it just takes time for brands to build a community and even more time for that community to connect with the brand. However, making the clients understand this is often challenging. They probably want to see instant results, become a famous brand overnight, and go viral within a couple of weeks or days.
When the expectations of the clients are so high (even though it makes little to no sense), it is natural for the marketers to begin doubting their own strategy and go back to starting everything from scratch too soon. This is why, as a digital marketer, it is our responsibility to manage the expectations of the clients right from the beginning, and this is a crucial step if you want things to go smoothly. We must make them realize that while committing to a strategy, how vital it is to recognize its potential success as well as failures at times. This will help make sure that when things are not going too well, we can always go back to evaluate and modify instead of redoing the whole strategy, which is more likely than not a waste of time and resources.
Conclusion
Before employing a digital marketing strategy, it is essential to take all the basics into consideration, including your client’s business goals (both short term and long term), community, plans for all digital platforms, and the value you plan to add in the lives of the communities developed in the platforms as mentioned earlier. Once you have considered and implemented all the basics during the execution phase, patience will help you and your client to relish this journey as the brand thrives. We might be living in the era of instant messaging and pleasure, and sure there are a lot of things that can be accomplished overnight, but real, long-lasting success is not one of them. This is an achievement that requires time and a great deal of patience. After all, great things come to those who wait!