Digital Marketing That Doesn’t Translate Into Higher Sales Is Just Smoke and Mirrors.

That’s was the conclusion I came down to when I recently sat down for a one-on-one with Expansión Economía Digital, the digital supplement for one of Spain’s most important business publications. The next question might be: how can I avoid this fate for my digital marketing? The solution I can highly recommend is inbound marketing; it generates sales, improves consumers’ trust in brands, and, what is a boon for your bottom line, reduces the acquisition costs you have to incur to gain new customers. The agency I lead, WAM We Are Marketing, counts inbound marketing as one of our primary service offerings as we seek to help our clients grow in function with their objectives.

The inbound approach, which we could describe as “marketing with a magnet” rather than the traditional modus operandi of “marketing with a sledgehammer,” also affords you the opportunity to choose from a whole slew of KPIs. One of the biggest boons in the digital space is that you can measure just about anything. The older method focuses on costs per impression as the essential KPI, but today, if your objective is to produce a higher customer lifetime value or to have a higher average transaction cost per customer, inbound marketing can afford you that focus.

While picking and choosing from a smorgasbord of metrics is well and good, inbound marketing also affords you other advantages on the road towards a marketing strategy that delivers on what consumers are looking for. It all comes down with being at the right place at the right time with the right messaging for a given consumer. And in a marketing landscape where customer lifetime value measurements are crucial for efficiently optimizing resources (After all, it’s not as expensive to keep bringing the customers you already have back into the door than getting new ones to come in).

While inbound is at the heart of what we do at WAM, we are also firm believers in being a firm that centralizes all the moving parts that are critical to a successful global marketing strategy. This need came about from the unsatisfied need that AR Hotels had when it came to their marketing. As I explained to Expansión’s Elena Arrieta, “[i]n Spain, there are agencies specialized in search, in content, or in web development, but it’s tough to find someone who can provide an integrated vision of all these closely-related disciplines closely under one roof.” And as with many of the most excellent ideas that have been the seed for some of the most successful entrepreneurial ventures, WAM was born to integrate each component under a cohesive, united vision for our clients.

While it is not necessarily sacrilegious to outsource each part of your marketing strategy to a separate provider, there is a risk that it could not deliver on one of the most critical components that your marketing strategy needs. That’s because your marketing needs to rely on a “…strategy that integrates the entire customer journey, from awareness passing through conversion to sales, and finally, loyalty.” If it doesn’t feel like a seamless process, then your inbound marketing may not get the desired income. And, that means your digital marketing will be smoke and mirrors because there won’t be higher sales.

Read my interview in Expansión (in Spanish) here