When you run a business, your marketing can be one of the things that you focus on the most. After all, if people haven’t heard about your company then how can they be available to make purchases from you? Of course, most entrepreneurs put a lot of effort into learning how to do marketing well, but even the best marketers appreciate that it can be a process of trial and error to get the right marketing mix.
If you have been disappointed by the results of the marketing you have been doing to date, then this can be very disheartening and may make you wonder whether it’s the marketing at fault or something else in the complicated web of things that make up your business.
Here, we’re going to take a look at some of the reasons why marketing can fail, and where you might be able to make some changes to bring in more customers and convert more leads.
You Aren’t Able to Analyze Effectiveness or Return on Investment
As well as the marketing being effective to begin with, another important part of the recipe is being able to effectively analyse the results from one marketing method or campaign vs another. If you do not set up marketing with processes in mind to allow you to tell how well it is converting to things like site visits, mailing list sign ups, and even sales, then you will not be able to tell where in your marketing things are going right and where they’re going wrong.
Planning how you will work out the return on investment for each channel of marketing that you do is key to your marketing strategy almost as much as what that strategy actually contains. Common ways of doing this include analysing web statistics using online tools or plugins (for example MonsterInsights), using codes so that you can tell which promotions people are using, and even surveys of your customers when they purchase something that ask them where they heard about you. Gathering this data, however you choose to do it, will allow you to more accurately review the effectiveness of different marketing approaches.
You Have Put All Your Eggs in One Basket
Another thing that can sink your marketing is relying too heavily on one particular approach. Most marketing professionals will talk about a marketing mix, and this is for good reason. If you put all of your time and budget into, for example, Google advertising, you may find that there is a ceiling to how effective this can be. Combining different approaches such as social media, email marketing, and offline marketing approaches will allow you to reach different audiences and get your message seen more regularly.
Your Messages Aren’t Having Enough Impact
One problem with largely online marketing campaigns of the type that are usually used by e-commerce and online only businesses is the saturation of advertising messages that everybody tends to see online every day. Some studies have estimated that people see upwards of 2000 different promotional messages on their computers and mobiles each day. Your message may well be being lost in a sea of things that users are simply used to tuning out. More recently, in order to try and stand out from the general advertisement messages, sites have started using tools such as OptinMonster, due to its online targeting features that help to increase sales conversion rates. For example, one feature allows you to show personalised messages at the right time with behaviour automation, which are more likely to have an impact on the audience. You can learn more about it’s features at https://optinmonster.com/solutions/increase-sales-conversions/.
This is another reason why diversifying your marketing is important. Email marketing, for example, tends to have a better rate of actually being seen by the people who are exposed to it than messages shown on search engine results or on social media pages. This is because people tend to pay more attention to the things that arrive in their inbox than the promotional message surrounding the content that they want to see when they visit sites like Facebook or when they search on Google.
It is also important that when you do use methods of advertising that will appear on other sites or and social media, you put time and effort into working out what kind of messages are eye catching and appealing to your target audience. This is another area where good marketing analysis comes in
You Are Using Outdated Methods
There are some techniques used by online businesses that were effective several years ago, however, they no longer have the same impact thanks to changes in things like the algorithms on social media sites and search engines. As an example, it used to be a very good idea for all businesses to regularly post on their Facebook pages, however now that Facebook heavily filters what each user sees in their timeline, this no longer guarantees that more than a few people will see your posts.
Facebook is still very useful for advertisers, and having a Facebook page is still advised, however Facebook is no longer a good source of free marketing, as it once was.
Equally Google has changed the way it displays local businesses on maps in search engine results and this has had an effect on businesses who had based their search engine optimisation approaches on older versions of Google.
Your Brand Isn’t Well Formed Enough
Another reason why your marketing may be failing is that your brand is not well defined enough for people who have seen your marketing messages to actually remember your company, what you do, and why it might be of interest to them. The general thinking in advertising is that the average person needs to see a brand name or logo around seven times before they will remember it and recognise it again in the future.
In order to create a relationship in your customers’ minds between themselves as consumers and you as a business, you need to make sure they both see and understand your branding as regularly as possible. Does your company have a memorable name? Is it easy to remember your website address? Are your logo, colour scheme, and other brand elements prominent on all of your marketing?
There are a lot of things that go into creating a strong brand that will have the right impact on the people who see it. A brand should not only be easy to remember and associate with the industry you are in or what you do, but it should also tell the customer something about your selling points. As an example, the kind of working culture that you encourage can be reflected in your business name and branding. The branding chosen for something traditional and trustworthy like an insurer would of course be different to a company that sees itself as young, fun and innovative such as a video game website.
Making sure that all of the elements people see on your website and on your marketing really reflect your brand and give a cohesive message about what your brand is like will help your marketing to sink in when people see it.
In some cases, marketing can fail for reasons that are not immediately obvious. It can seem like you have been doing everything right, but perhaps the timing was wrong, or it is simply a time when people on the whole are not especially interested in what you do. This can happen for example if you sell luxury goods during a period of financial uncertainty, or can be related to seasonal trends. The only way to keep on moving forward and improving your marketing results over the long-term is to continuously review what you are doing and how it is working and to keep tweaking your marketing mix.
Be aware too, that sometimes something that’s working very well right now will not work so well in a few months’ time, as trends are constantly evolving. You should never rest on your laurels when it comes to marketing, even if you have what seems like the perfect solution for the current time.