Startups

5 Digital Marketing Habits Geared for Success in 2019

Published

6 years ago

Feb 3, 2019

The digital marketing landscape is in constant flux. New social platforms are born daily, while others fizzle out, and search engine algorithms are updated hundreds of times a year. What worked last year may not work this year. The reasons you need a digital marketing strategy remain similar each year, but to be successful in 2019, you should practice the 5 digital marketing habits below.

1. Know Thyself and Thy Industry

Before you can begin to promote yourself with digital marketing, you need to understand who you are as a brand. That means taking the time to determine what you stand for and to whom you speak to. You speak differently to your parents at a family meal than you do to friends when you’re at a bar. They’re different audiences. If you understand your audience, you’ll better understand the voice with which you should speak.

It’s not enough to know thyself; you must also know your industry. If you sell socks, you should be following the world’s greatest sock makers on social media, reading blog feeds from sock experts, and attending sock conferences. You need to know everything about socks! Take time every day to read about your industry, even if it’s just for 15 minutes.

Set up the Feedly app on your phone and read articles whenever there’s a few minutes to spare. Being up-to-date in your industry will help you become better at what you do and may spark ideas for content to include in your digital marketing strategy.

“Marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make but about the stories you tell.” – Seth Godin

2. Diversify

Because the digital space is constantly changing, you need to make sure your strategies are spread out across multiple disciplines. That means focusing not just on search engine optimization (SEO) (an update to Google’s algorithm can potentially sink your entire SEO campaign) or social media (a platform may fall out of favor or advertising may become more difficult, as it recently did on Facebook).

Instead, build out a strategy that includes all the key elements of digital marketing, which are:

Search Engine Optimization
Social Media Marketing
Paid Advertising (pay-per-click ads, banner ads, remarketing, etc.)
Content Marketing

It’s not enough to set up each of these things; they need to work together as part of a cohesive strategy. The true power of digital marketing only works when these four elements are in tandem. Your social media team needs to know when new content goes up. Your SEO team needs to optimize landing pages for paid advertising campaigns. If you can diversify while maintaining communication, you’ll succeed.

Certain elements of search engine optimization, social media, paid advertising, and content are timeless, but diversifying also means shifting digital marketing strategies as new ones develop. Not only do you need to know thy own industry, you need to know what’s current in digital marketing. Following sites such as Moz and Search Engine Land can help you stay up to date.

3. Be Consistent

Most of us have gotten excited about writing a blog post, thrown it together, posted it, and forgotten about the blog entirely for three months. It’s easy to do something once, but it’s difficult to do the same thing day in and day out. Digital marketing is about the here and now.

It’s always changing. What was true yesterday isn’t always true today. If you want your business to remain relevant, you need to be consistently adding new content and updating what you post. You should aim for the following:

Ongoing search engine optimization
Daily social media monitoring
Blog posts at least once a month (preferably 2-4 times a month. More if you’re a media site)
Weekly or bi-weekly paid advertising adjustments

4. Focus on Quality

If you’re running a digital marketing campaign, you should be familiar with Google’s quality guidelines. The core principles of the guidelines are (paraphrased):

- Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.
- Don’t deceive your users. Be open and honest.
- Avoid tricks and questionable practices. Ask yourself, “Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?” If the answer is no, don’t do it.
- Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging and make your website stand out from your competitors’ sites.

In the digital marketing space, the cream always rises to the top. There’s no sense in spending an hour each on ten sub-par articles when you can spend ten hours on one amazing article. The amazing article is going to outrank a sub-par article 100% of the time.

Statistically, longer, better-written articles receive more links. It’s easy to simply retweet others in your industry, but a quality digital marketing will take time to craft a retweet that evokes the company’s brand. If it’s easy, then everyone else is doing it.

“If your business is not on the internet, then your business will be out of business.” – Bill Gates

5. Go Where Your Competitors Can’t or Won’t Follow

As Google mentions in their quality guidelines: Make your website (read: digital strategy) stands out from others in the field. There’s only one way to do this, and it involves going where competitors can’t or won’t go. It costs money and time to run a great digital marketing campaign, two things a lot of your competitors won’t be willing to expend.

They’ll create blog posts, sure, but they won’t be willing to spend 10 hours crafting an amazing piece that includes unique videos, infographics, and pictures. They’ll get links from directories, but they won’t be willing to spend the time to develop the relationships needed for high quality links. Go above and beyond, and your digital success will follow.

6. Pick the Right Gear

Centuries ago, we could go hunting almost barehanded. Now, we can not. The same with hunting for the right leads: nothing is possible without the right gear in the digital marketing realm. From basic in-built Gmail CRMs to complex ad tech platforms — most brands equip themselves with some tech stack. Otherwise, they risk ending up underdogs.

Here are some tips for picking the right tech:

Analyze your channels. Focus on these that bring you more leads; they are most likely to require more automation.
Avoid settling for the popular solution just because it’s hyped. Try to check out 3-5 alternatives; this might save you some dollars.
Pay attention to integrations available: it’s pretty cool if your tools from different providers can be synchronized.
Seek solutions with advanced analytics features. It’s the only way possible to check your performance and the tool’s actual ROI.
Pick relatively simple tools rather than complex ones. Stats say that users of complex tools use only up to 30% of their functionality.

Which tool to pick first? The State of Marketing Automation report says that social media marketing is the most suitable process to be automated. The most popular one, though, is email marketing. We can’t also overlook programmatic advertising, which is the semi-automated media buying process with many platforms having auto-optimization tools.

Interestingly enough, even content marketing can be automated with machine learning tools that analyze your content engagement and predict when, where, and how your content will perform in the best way. So if your primary channel seems to be not subject to automation, dig in! You might be pretty surprised.

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Geoff Hoesch

Geoff Hoesch is the CEO of Dragonfly Digital Marketing, a Baltimore-based digital marketing agency. He’s provided digital marketing help to hundreds of companies and individuals over the past 12 years, always promoting the practice of quality over quantity. You can find his company on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.

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Scale Your Business

Tired of Wasting Money on the Wrong Marketers? Here’s How Smart Entrepreneurs Are Finally Hiring Right

Published

2 days ago

May 24, 2025

Addicted2Success Editor

If you’ve ever Googled how to hire a Facebook marketer or best TikTok marketing agency only to spend thousands on someone who couldn’t deliver…congrats, you’ve joined a very expensive club! For many entrepreneurs, hiring a digital marketer feels like more like visiting a casino and gambling with your runway, than it feels like securing a partner who’ll help build your business. Often, it feels like you’re betting on a stranger to grow the dream you’ve poured your savings into.

And way too often, you lose that bet.

You don’t need another list of the “Top 10 Agencies” with five-star testimonials and polished logos. You need to know which marketer can actually drive results for your business. Not in theory. In practice.

This is where entrepreneurs are learning to pivot. And it’s why a new platform called TruthMetric.com is turning heads across the startup world.

Why Most Startups Burn Through 3–6 Marketers Before Finding the Right One

Here’s the hard truth: most startups don’t fail because of their product, they fail because they can’t get sales or sell it fast enough. And in trying to fix that, founders usually go through five or six marketers, burning tens of thousands before finding someone who truly knows how to convert.

You build your product, get your website live, maybe even launch an ad campaign. But when you search for help and look up how to “hire a YouTube ads agency” or “top Facebook ad expert for Shopify”, you get hit with a sea of shiny portfolios, “ninja” titles, and endless promises.

Three months later, you’re still waiting on your first profitable campaign, and you’re most likely out tens of thousands, feeling utterly defeated…and maybe grinning with an affinity for that upcoming boxing class with a picture of that marketer’s fac……nevermind.

If this sounds like you, it’s time for what one entrepreneur called a strategic shift to scale smarter, not harder.

Introducing TruthMetric.com: The Transparent Marketplace for Hiring Marketers Who Deliver

TruthMetric.com isn’t just another freelancer platform or agency directory. It’s the first hiring solution where you can see three years of real, verified marketing performance before spending a dime.

That includes:

Verified ad campaign performance
Actual return on ad spend (ROAS)
Industry-specific experience
Platform specialties (Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, Google Ads, and more)

Whether you’re looking for a Facebook ads expert, a TikTok marketer, or a YouTube growth strategist, TruthMetric.com lets you filter and compare based on what actually matters, results.

This level of clarity is something you won’t find on platforms like Upwork or Fiverr. And it solves what many founders know too well as the New York Pizza Problem: where every marketer claims they’re “the best,” just like every pizzeria in Manhattan says they’re #1. Often without showing you results, you get sucked into this dream of collaboration, until the nightmare commences the moment you fork that first invoice payment. Hence the deception that leads to many business owners losing their hard earned savings and budget to launch their grand idea.

With TruthMetric, you finally get the data to decide for yourself, BEFORE you hire. Now if only New York Pizza shops had the same transparency then maybe you’d finally find the best pizza in New York, perhaps the perfect post work out after a boxing sesh? I think so!

Why Founders Are Shifting to Results-First Hiring

Most entrepreneurs think they need to do it all themselves, until they burn out or burn through their budget. That’s exactly why this founder had to drop the Superman complex and hire a marketing genius.

What makes TruthMetric so powerful is that it turns hiring into a confident move, not a hopeful one. You’re no longer guessing. You’re choosing from proven performers. You know what vertical they dominate. You know their past client performance. You see the monthly results from the campaigns they ran, and the outcomes they achieved.

It’s not just efficient. It’s empowering.

Scaling Quickly Requires Automation and Eliminating the Noise

Founders who scale quickly understand one thing: growth isn’t just about hustle, it’s about systems. TruthMetric is the system for finding great marketers at speed. No more DM’ing ten freelancers or interviewing agencies feeling like you are asking the world of them to just see some prior results. Instead you get to see the information you need to make an informed decision and plug into verified talent, all ready to perform.

This difference allows for you to match perfectly with the right talent quickly. If you’re building your business to run lean and fast, this convenience plugged in with automation can help you scale your small business right alongside your new marketing hires.

Why TruthMetric Is Also a Boon for Marketers, Not Just Founders

This isn’t just a win for founders, it is a gift for great marketers, too.

If you’re a freelance marketer who’s been quietly pulling 10x ROAS for clients while being passed over for flashy agencies, you now have a stage where your results speak louder than your brand.

TruthMetric is a true meritocracy. No fluff. No sales tricks. Just data.

If you’re tired of being overlooked and ready to stand out based on what you actually deliver, this is your home.

The Secret Weapon for Investors and M&A Operators

There’s another angle here that some of our readers might miss.

Investors, private equity firms, and M&A advisors should be drooling at the thought of having a proven talent pool they can plug and play and the ability to use TruthMetric to revive underperforming companies. Imagine acquiring a business or becoming an active investor, then dropping in a verified operator with a history of explosive growth in that niche.

It’s plug-and-play. Scale on demand.

That kind of insight has never been available before. You couldn’t do this on Upwork. You certainly can’t do it through a friend-of-a-friend referral.

And when it comes to attracting high-performing talent, here’s how to hire top talent and keep them around.

Let’s Really Drive This Home…

If you’ve wasted money on agencies or freelancers who couldn’t deliver, it’s not because you’re bad at hiring, it’s because the game was stacked against you. Trusting dreamy charismatic sales pitches over data was a doomed approach from the start.

TruthMetric levels the playing field by showing you what no other talent marketplace does and that’s proof.

Real marketers. Real results. Real growth.

It’s time to stop guessing and start hiring based on data.
Visit TruthMetric.com and make your next marketing hire the one that actually works.

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