Why Your Marketing is Failing!

Marketing is at the heart of every business. Companies need successful marketing strategies to promote their brands, reach their audience, and attract new customers. There is also no better tool to help maintain the relationship between businesses & customers. Businesses need to build a relationship of trust with customers and marketing helps to establish that. Basically, how a company markets its business will determine the success or otherwise. However, the effectiveness of those in charge of this process has been called out, and is being increasingly scrutinized.

There’s a growing group of individuals that are beginning to believe that the absence up until this point of a single marketing solution that meets the goals of every company in every industry at scale, and among countless other variants, is worrying and makes for a definite case against marketing. 

While advertising has never promised guarantees, it is also true that many managers who create marketing strategies fall way short of their goals. In fact, with respect to the recent rise in Influencer Marketing, an extensive Ad-week reports that Instagram followers with under 1,000 followers have a like rate of about 8% while those between 1,000 to 10,000 have a rate of around 4%. As the follower rate grows, engagement drops further. Which ideally should beg the question: How relevant is an influencer’s content to the sales of a brand’s product or service?  

With an increased emphasis on Digital & Content Marketing most especially, this continued scrutiny on the role of marketing will continue to rise. However, as with everything, marketing works if done properly. It’s worth looking at some of the reasons why marketing strategies fail and how to avoid that:

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Research, Research, Research 

To create a successful marketing strategy, you need to know who you’re marketing to. The most fabulous product in the world will not compensate for having any market knowledge to know your audience & ideal customer. This means that market research should be one of the first steps in the planning process.

Every marketer understands the need for targeting the right audience and the brands that skip this essential step risk creating content that won’t convert. This means that even if every other aspect of their strategy is perfect, it still won’t be effective in attracting new customers.

To prevent this from happening, spend some time creating marketing personas for different segments of your target audience. Consider not only the demographics of your potential customers, but also their needs, values, and interests. Then test different sets of messaging on the target audience to help determine the right channels for the varying aspects of a campaign. 

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Set Concrete Goals

Many marketers fail simply because they don’t know what they’re working towards. A brand can avoid this by setting concrete goals that are clear and achievable. 

SMART - specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely - is a popular goal-setting acronym that helps to keep track of this. Each of those characteristics is equally important to creating goals. 

For example, let’s imagine the goal is to increase conversions on your website. This is a common goal for many businesses, but one that leaves a lot of room for interpretation. You can set an attainable goal of increasing the average conversion rate on your site’s product pages from 0.2% to 0.4% by the end of a quarter. This may sound like overkill, but this level of specificity is essential to the achievement of goals.

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Aim At Building Long Term Relationships With Customers  

The process of building a brand that customers trust is long-term and an ever-evolving process. While purchases drive revenue, customers are much more valuable than that. To build a loyal customer base, relationship marketing is important. But it’s much more than going with what’s trendy to achieve that. This a process that must be carefully nurtured. 

Engaging with your customers on a regular basis means a brand can earn their support overtime. This is important since acquiring new customers is more difficult (and expensive) than retaining existing ones. Not only that, but long-term engagement helps build your brand’s reputation. When you show customers that you value their support – and not just their money – you prove that your company is more than just the products you offer.

If you use content marketing to attract visitors to your site, this will be many potential customers’ first interaction with your brand. And if the information is well-researched, thorough, and genuinely useful, it will show them that your company is a valuable resource – and make a great first impression. This can be continued by providing great customer service at all stages of the buying process. 

In some cases, you can address their concerns with a simple answer or additional information. If you begin to get the same concerns from multiple customers, this indicates that your products or business model have room for improvement. Implementing their feedback also shows that you truly care about providing a great customer experience.

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Avoid Outdated Trends 

In the past decade alone, the options for marketers looking to grow their company’s revenue have significantly changed. At all stages of the evolution of a brand, the marketing strategy has to be dynamic enough to take advantage of the times. 

Traditional methods like newspaper ads and billboards used to be extremely useful for attracting new customers. And while they still have their place in large-scale campaigns, they’re no longer the most effective, in terms of both cost and results. 

With digital channels though it is certainly easier to reach a larger, more targeted audience than ever before. This is great news for marketers who’ve taken the time to learn about and test them but damaging for those who haven’t. Millions of consumers now use the Internet on a daily basis, and this is commensurate with the rise of strategies like SEO, PPC, Content Marketing, and Social Media Marketing. 

Companies are however set in routines and trends that it seems unthinkable to make drastic shifts even when the research is pointing towards it. When you’re up against competitors who engage customers with a variety of strategies, you’re unlikely to beat them since they simply reach more people.

Taking advantage of the new forms of advertisement means you can tailor ads to individual segments and use advanced targeting to make sure they reach the right people. However, it’s important to note that once you make the switch to Internet marketing, you can’t simply rely on strategies for a long time. Trends and best practices shift frequently, and again if you aren’t dynamic enough to keep up, you risk falling behind the competition again.

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Measure Results Too

In 2020, brands have access to a wealth of data relating to their success. You can track how many people visit a site, click on ads, and convert as a result of a specific campaign. It really depends on how specific you want to be.

With this information, the strategy can be adjusted to focus on the most effective channels and eliminate the ones that aren’t attracting new customers. This means it’s important to stay on top of your analytics and monitor your campaigns regularly. If you don’t measure your results, you can’t have the data you need to improve your strategy going forward. This is a mistake that could end up costing a company in the long run.

Monitoring and analyzing your campaigns don’t have to be difficult. With tools like Google Analytics, you can get an in-depth look at all of the metrics that matter. Setting up custom reports also makes it easier to understand marketing initiatives. As with any marketing tactic, though, you get out of analytics what you put into it. So if you don’t have the time to learn about reporting tools and set up a strategy that works for your business, it may be better to outsource that to professionals.