There are many things to like about all kinds of online marketing services. Social media marketing and search engine optimization are all the rage right now, but in order to be successful and show positive ROI, you've got to diversify.
Only focusing on one tactic is like running a marathon with your legs tied together. You can hobble in the right direction, but you're not going to win. Digital marketing tactics are meant to work together in order to accomplish a common goal. One tactic utilized by your business cannot compete with five being utilized by your competitor. Let's check out a few (of the many) reasons why relying on one tactic to handle your full marketing load isn't a good idea...
You need to reach your customers and potential customers at all every stage of their journey. Reaching people at the attract stage requires different interaction than reaching someone in the close stage. You need to be communicating different messages and reaching them through different mediums. Only focusing on one tactic doesn't allow you to do this. Check out the inbound methodology and think about what each person looks like in each stage:
Becoming an authority in your industry takes a lot of work and it definitely takes more than having a social media presence. In order to be viewed as an authority in your industry, you've got to be providing great content and be in front of your audience constantly. Just posting on social media or just having a website doesn't establish you as an industry authority. You've got to dig deeper.
If you don't know by now, Google rules the world. Seriously. Online marketing services all have some sort of impact on your search engine ranking. Whether you're active on social media, directing traffic to your website through email marketing, optimizing your content through an SEO campaign, blogging with a great keyword strategy, or pushing traffic to landing pages, everything you're doing has an impact on your search engine ranking. A "build it and they will come" approach is not a reliable strategy. You're going to have to work to get ranked highly on the keywords that you target and it will require a diversified approach to digital marketing.
Not everyone is on Facebook. Not everyone reads blog posts. Not everyone will visit your landing pages. So if you're only focusing on one specific tactic, you're missing a whole segment of your target market. Your message has to be spread out throughout the internet in order to reach everyone that you want to reach. Don't pigeon hole yourself, get your name, brand, logo, and information in front of people through as many tactics as make sense for your business.
NOTE: This does NOT mean you should be everywhere. You don't need to be everything to everyone. Determining where your customers spend their time online and focusing your efforts there is imperative. You're not going to promote your accounting firm on Instagram because your target market isn't hanging out there.
We hear all the time that XYZ tactic is working really well for a specific business so that is all they focus on, or we hear XYZ tactic never worked, we tried it for a month and didn't get anything out of it. How do you know that XYZ tactic is working or isn't working? What is it compared to? Is 10 leads per month good or bad? Is 50 new followers better than 50 blog post views? Is getting a 20% open rate on your email campaigns better than 3 new form fills on your landing page? My point here is that it's all subjective. What you think is doing really well (or really poorly) may not be accurate. If you aren't trying multiple tactics you'll never know what is actually your most (and least) successful.
Unfortunately, there is no magic answer. No one is going to be able to tell you that one tactic or another is going to be your answer to online marketing. It just doesn't work that way. We are all different. We all have a different way we want to be contacted by a business and ways we don't. If you are only focusing on email marketing, how many people are you missing by not blogging, being active on social media, or working on your search engine optimization? No online marketing strategy can really be successful by utilizing just one tactic. Take the time to understand where your customers spend their time, how they respond to specific tactics, and determine what success looks like for each tactic and then build your online marketing strategy around that. You may find that the one tactic that you were using alone is actually your least effective.