As a marketing professional, I talk to all kinds of business owners. The most common kind, though, is the frustrated one. Small business owners are more frustrated by their marketing activities than almost any other aspect of their business.
Here’s what they say: “I tried that, and it didn’t work.”
Here’s what that statement usually means: “I can’t directly connect a sale to that.”
Business owners who start out taking care of marketing on their own usually hope to see a direct cause-and-effect pattern with their efforts. They try a tactic and measure its success by the revenue they can verify as coming from it. They use an arbitrary timeline to determine whether or not it worked. The result is that they end up with a pile of so-called failed marketing attempts and the aforementioned frustration.
If this sounds familiar, I have good news. It’s not that the specific thing you tried can’t work or won’t ever work for you. It’s that those tactics either aren’t being applied as part of a clearly defined marketing strategy or they need to have the touch of a professional. Once you create a strategy, gain a better understanding of what it means to work or not work, and bring in a professional where needed, your marketing is much more likely to be effective.
Why Don’t Marketing Tactics Work?
There are a lot of variables that go into executing each marketing tactic. All those variables amount to getting the right asset in front of the right people and inviting a response.
Business owners who try to get their marketing plan off the ground themselves don’t always know how to work through all those variables yet.
To put this variable idea into perspective, consider an everyday task for which you have already internalized all the variables. Your morning commute, for example, is an activity that has several variables. Depending on the time of year, you probably look at the weather the night before so you can leave at the right time. You have your day’s schedule in mind when you decide what to wear or pack for lunch. You have a few alternate routes in case there’s a road issue along the way. You know exactly who to contact if something happens that’s going to make you late. You can probably think of 4 or 5 other details that you simply understand as having an impact on getting to work on time, and you manage all of them without breaking a sweat. But if you were to magically switch places with someone and have to tackle their morning commute for the first time in your life, you would be under a lot of stress managing all those variables in real time!
When you simply launch a marketing initiative without first thinking through all of the variables, it’s like that first time commute. You don’t even know what they are yet.
These are a few of the most common examples I find when I analyze a DIY marketing strategy:
Wrong target audience - if you are marketing to the wrong people, you can’t attract the right people. If you haven’t defined your target audience (no, you can’t serve everyone), then your marketing will be lost in the crowd.
Wrong journey - people interact with your marketing at different stages of their buying journey, so your marketing needs to meet them at the right step in order to move them forward.
Wrong message - similar to the journey, it’s important to know what matters most to your target audience and talk about that in your messaging. Your message also needs to be well-written or clearly delivered in whatever media you use.
Wrong technology - whether you’re on the wrong platform for your audience, not setting up your backend tools correctly, or using outdated technology, this problem can prevent customers from reaching you.
Wrong execution - if there is no market for your offer at your price, your timing is off for the market, or you aren’t following up on potential sales, you won’t see positive results in your marketing.
Wrong budget - not spending enough, or not spending long enough to gain traction, will prevent optimization of your ads and search engine efforts.
Business owners are almost all dealing with a combination of these issues. Once we work through the variables, all of these wrongs can be made right.
How Can I Make My Marketing Activities Work?
Now that we’ve seen a lot of reasons why marketing activities don’t work, it should be pretty clear that it’s usually not the activities themselves. To get your marketing activities to work, we need to strategize.
Your strategy starts with identifying your ideal client. I call this your persona profile, and it’s foundational to everything you’ll do in marketing.
Once you know who you want to serve, what they are looking for, and where you will find them, we can implement (or re-implement) marketing activities that you’ll commit to with purposeful confidence.
Let’s take your website’s blog as an example. If you gave up blogging because you thought it didn’t work, we can look at why it didn’t work and see if it’s worth bringing back on track. Who should be reading your blog, where are they in their buying journey, and what exactly do you want them to do after reading it? Business blogs should contain keywords, be well-written, and be informative. All blogs need to have a clear next step for readers to take.
You also need to remember to actually invite people to your blog. When you publish a blog on your website, share it on social media, send an email to your contacts introducing it - do something to drive people to the page. You can’t simply publish a blog and expect people to magically know about it, and go read it.
Website analytics are helpful here, as well, if you know what to look for. Your analytics can give you an idea of how people get to your blog, whether they are reading the whole blog, or if they click right off of the page. This information gives some great clues about what to try differently.
Another example might be social media ads. Let’s make sure your tone and branding are matched to your target audience. Let’s also define the parameters of your ad so that you’re not losing money on clicks from the wrong people. Are you diligent about responding to comments and messages that come in from your ad? Do you have buttons set up correctly for people who take action, and will they experience continuity when they move to the next step? We need to keep in mind that the ad is one element of a larger process.
When marketing activities work, they don’t always result in a direct, identifiable sale. Sometimes they simply move a potential client closer so that you can initiate a relationship and build trust. We’ll take a look at your sales cycle so that you can budget correctly for the length of time it takes to see a return on your investment.
Knowing When to Bring in A Professional
Even if you’ve thought through the whole strategy, know where people are in their decision-making process, and have matched the tactic to that step in the process, the reality is that you might need professional, outside assistance to finalize the implementation. For one, most business owners are not professional marketers; they have other skills and expertise that led them to start their businesses. And secondly, even if a business owner has good marketing experience, usually they are too far deep into their business to be able to take an objective perspective on what is necessary to say and create in a marketing tactic.
I’ve seen this where a business owner created a lengthy, automated email campaign to drive sales in his business. While it was the right idea and technically implemented correctly, the general content and writing in each email needed some work. The assistance of a skilled copywriter could take that email campaign from “not working” to generating the leads he imagined.
When you run a business, trying to do it all yourself (including bookkeeping, taxes, HR, and marketing) is not setting yourself up for success.
Even if you can’t outsource every aspect of business because of your current resources, you need to find the areas where help will be most beneficial and bring in professionals. If you’re tight on budget talk with service providers to see if there are ways they can provide guidance or feedback without having to hand it all over to them. After all, no man is an island.
Marketing Strategy is the Sum of All Parts
It’s rare that one specific marketing tactic will turn into a sale. It happens, of course. But more often than not, your sales are the result of a strategic marketing plan. Once you spend the time and resources developing a cohesive marketing strategy that meets your potential clients at various stages of their journey, you will see that it all actually works together over time. Even the elements that one particular client never interacted with will be part of the background that amplified you enough to get in front of them.
If you are one of those business owners who has “tried that, and it didn’t work,” it’s time to jump in and try again. But it won’t really be trying this time. It will be a more thoughtful application of marketing principles that are designed specifically for your ideal client. I always start with strategy as an essential process to getting a business closer to the people they serve.
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