If you are wondering what went wrong and what to do about it, have a look at the following list of reasons why your marketing may not be hitting the spot…
1. Lack of strategy
A lot of marketing misses the mark because of an initial failure to create a strategy. Whether you are making an effort to post on social media regularly, sending out marketing emails or publishing blog posts and other fresh content on your website – without having some idea of what you are hoping to achieve and how you are going to approach it, you may find you have wasted your valuable time and money.
Creating a strategy means determining the goals for your marketing activity, defining and then targeting your audience, defining your success metrics and planning your delivery.
You can find more information on how to create and implement a strategy here
Further reading
How to create a content strategy - and why you should!
2. Poor Targeting
Sometimes, things don’t work out because your messaging and marketing content are not reaching the right people. This could be because you have failed to identify who you are trying to target, or that you are trying to reach them in the wrong place.
As well as having a clear idea of who you are trying to reach, you need to have an idea of where they hang out. There is no point spending time and effort on Twitter if your customer are not there. The purpose of undertaking a persona building exercise, as well as identifying the people you are trying to reach, is to also identify where you are most likely to reach those people. If you don’t get this right, it’s a bit like trying to find a radio station on the wrong frequency!
3. You haven’t given it enough time
If you are expecting results immediately, you are likely to be disappointed. Particularly if you are adopting a content-based approach to marketing. Content or inbound marketing needs time to start to show definite results. There are of course metrics you can measure to make sure you are heading in the right direction but if you are expecting to see genuine ROI as soon as you get started you are almost certain to experience disappointment! You need to allow enough time for things to work and changing tactic too readily means that you never really know what is having an effect and what is not.
If you want quicker results, a run of well targeted paid advertising could be effective in the short term to boost traffic or raise awareness, but without other, more organically produced momentum, this will probably only continue for as long as you are prepared to throw money at it. Pay per click advertising and social media promotion can get expensive, especially if you are in a market with strong competition.
4. There are barriers to conversion
Even if you have done everything right, created a good strategy, identified your audience and targeted them well – your results still may suffer if you don’t make it easy for prospects to carry out the action you want from them.
If you are prioritising sign-ups with a piece of marketing – make sure that your sign-up call to action is in a prominent place on your landing page and has a compelling message. If you want prospects to buy something online – help them make up their minds and feel confident in their purchase by providing great product listings and incorporating social proof. If you want to take online bookings – don’t hide your book now button at the bottom of the page or in your top menu. Targeted landing pages, prominent call to action points and persuasive messaging are an essential part of the process. How are you solving a customer’s problem with your product? How will your service be of benefit? Why are you better than the competition - make sure that these messages are clearly stated on your landing page to give customers the confidence to buy.
Further reading
Getting Started on Conversion Optimisation
What Makes a Landing Page Which Converts
5. You are not investing enough
Investment in marketing is about more than simply spending money on it. The investment also needs to be in the time and effort you put in to achieving your goals. There is no point, for example, in spending a lot of money on pay per click advertising and driving traffic through to a website which does not work properly or does not have well considered conversion paths for customers.
If your website content needs overhauling – you need to dedicate the time to it. If you lack the time to put to those kinds of jobs, it may be better to consider outsourcing this to a specialist before embarking on a marketing campaign.
6. You are not delivering on your promises
It may be that you have done everything right, your strategy is flawless, you have targeted the right people, in the right place at the right time and your messaging is exactly what they needed to hear - so far, so good.
If your product or service does not then live up to the promises or expectations of your prospects, your marketing efforts will all be in vain. If you have ever clicked on a search engine link which turns out to be misleading, it’s annoying. It is also likely to be ultimately counter-productive and misleading results tend to lead to higher bounce rates and short dwell times – both indicative that the result is not useful to the searcher. So, it is important to make sure that your marketing matches up with the reality of what you are offering! Over promising may get people through the door but it will not get them to stay.
If you are struggling with marketing or are not seeing the results you are expecting – get in touch for a free initial consultation and recommendations.