Posts

Here’s why your Marketing Efforts are Failing

/in /by

StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article |Marketing|Here’s why your Marketing Efforts are FailingIf you run a business, then it’s understandable why you would want your marketing efforts to be successful. If you aren’t sure if yours are then there are a couple of things that you can do to try and help yourself. Take a look below to try and find out more.

Lack of Strategy

The main reason why your business marketing doesn’t work is because you don’t have a strategy. It may be that you are conducting your marketing activities without thinking about them properly or even that you are just too busy chasing the next big thing. If you want to help yourself here, then you have to make sure that you understand your business goals and that you build a strategy that works around it. If you don’t then you will be wasting your time and your money, and this is the last thing that you need.

You Don’t Understand your Customers.

Think about it, when was the last time you really gave your customers some thought? When was the last time you rang them up or took the time to really talk to them? If you haven’t done this in quite some time, then it may help to do that now. If you don’t then you may become out of touch with your customer base or you may even find that you don’t know who they are. When you do this, you will give yourself the chance to really understand them and what they want from you.

Not Having a Call to Action

When it comes to digital marketing, it’s very easy for you to get caught up in social media without having a real call to action. Your customers may have an interest in your business, but they might not know the action that you want them to take. This can be frustrating for them and for you, so whenever you do post on social media, make sure that you have a call to action and also make sure that you make your message clear.

You’re Not Using the Right Channels

If you want to understand how important using the right channels is, then take the following as an example. CB radios are used by truckers as it allows them to communicate with each other. The one thing that you need to take note of is that both truckers need to be tuned in to the same channel in order to actually hear one another. If they don’t then they will be talking with no response. In other words, it doesn’t really matter what they say, because they aren’t being heard. Marketing works in a very similar way. If your business is marketing through a channel that your customers are not using, then you can guarantee that they won’t be getting the message. For example, if you are spending all of your time marketing through Twitter but you know that your potential prospects don’t have a Twitter account then this won’t be doing you any favours at all. If you want to help yourself here, then you need to discover where your audience hangs out and where they get all of their information. Are they going online? Are they using social networking sites? If so which ones? By finding out this information, you can then begin to invest in the right channels, and you can also make sure that your efforts are not going to waste.

Poor Targeting

Sometimes your marketing efforts won’t work because you are essentially targeting the wrong people. You might be using the right channels and you may feel as though you have everything lined up, but if you are targeting people who have no interest in your product then this will really go against you. This is very common in digital advertising, as you essentially have the option to connect with the whole world. Take Facebook for example, they make it very easy for you to boost your post if you are willing to pay a little bit of money. This approach isn’t really targeted though, so if you are wondering why your reach isn’t very good or if you aren’t sure why you’re not converting then there is a high chance that this is the reason why. You are essentially not sending the right advertisements to the right people and if you are not careful then this will really put a hole in your pocket.

You’re Not Being Patient

Sometimes marketing doesn’t work because you don’t stick at it long enough. Sometimes it can take up to a year for you to start seeing real results. Sure, you will see some indicators along the way that your strategy is working, but you won’t really start seeing major results until this time. This is why perseverance is so important. You have to make sure that you don’t give up and that you also make sure that you give your campaign more than enough time. If you want fast results, check out these video marketing ideas.

Your Service Sucks

Sometimes the problem isn’t with the marketing you’re doing. Sometimes the problem will actually lie with you. This can be a tough pill to swallow but it’s something that you do need to be aware of. If you are really good at marketing, then you may get some people in the door, but they will drop your company in a matter of seconds if you are not able to live up to their expectations. For this reason, you have to make sure that you live up to your promises and that you also provide them with a fantastic customer service. If you want to help yourself here, then you will soon find that talking to your customers is super important. If you don’t then you might you are not giving them what they need, and this is the last thing that you want when you are trying to build your business.

You Aren’t Investing

Sure, you may be investing a great deal in your marketing budget and this is great, but if it’s still an afterthought for your organisation or if your team are not contributing as much as they could be, then there is a high chance that you aren’t going to be achieving the results you need. Successful marketing requires both time and money, and if you are not investing both then you could be missing out. If you’re not sure where you’re going wrong, then this could be because your marketing budget is too small. If you are using PPC for example, then you may need to pay more so that you can show up under certain keywords. You might also have to spend more in order to get the visibility and the click-through rates that you need. Wishing and hoping will not get you where you want to be and you need to be diligent with your efforts too. It may be that you need to make a new site or that you refocus your sales process so that it is more customer-centred. Either way, it doesn’t really matter which option you go with, as long as you are implementing the right tactics and as long as you are actually listening to what your customers have to say.

You Make it Hard to Buy

Your business could be great, and your marketing might even be great too, but if you make it difficult for customers to buy from you then they certainly won’t. Think about it, how many times have you been able to find a great product online, but never actually ended up buying it purely because the buying process was far too difficult? It happens far more than you realise and it’s safe to say that this could be one of the many things holding your business back. If you want to help yourself here then you need to make sure that you make your buying process as simple as possible.

So if you feel as though your marketing efforts are failing miserably then there could be a couple of reasons for this. If you take your time and make sure that you are meeting the needs of your customers then you can turn things around. As mentioned above, it’s also important that you have a call to action and that you also make your buying process as simple as possible. If you do all of this then you will soon find that you are able to get the best result out of your marketing while also going above and beyond for your customers. If you need some more support, then it may be worth hiring a digital marketing service. When you do, they can then analyse your marketing efforts and they can also talk you through the changes you need to make and how they are going to make your business better and more efficient overall. When hiring a company, it also helps to make sure that they specialise in your niche, for example, if you deal in the sale of cars, hire a company that are known for their automobile SEO.

Do You Need Help With Your Marketing?

/in /by

StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article, Do You Need Help With Your Marketing?

Marketing is one of the central processes in the running of any business. If the marketing is done in the right way, then the business itself is going to be a success. However, if it is not right, you never know what fate might befall the company. But perfecting interactive marketing is a real challenge. There could be many times when you find you need help with it. It’s helpful to know for sure when you need that help, so that you can seek it out in time and make the most of it. In this post, we’ll look at a few of the clearest signs that you might need some help with your marketing.

Your Sales Are Low

One of the surest signs that you might need to consult a marketing agency is that you just aren’t shifting any products. Most businesses experience the occasional dip in sales, and that can be the result of a number of different things. But sometimes marketing is the problem, and it’s good to be aware of when that is so. Even if that is not the reason, you will find that improving your marketing is going to make a huge difference to how many products you sell, and for that reason it is absolutely worth looking into anyway. If you feel that you could be selling more, take a look at your marketing and see whether you might need any help with it. That alone could well be enough.

A Weak Brand

As a business, you need to have a strong brand which people can immediately recognize and relate to. This is central to keeping your business in line with what you want to achieve, and it is one of the things that you are going to want to keep an eye on throughout your business. However, if you have come to realize that your brand is actually relatively unclear, then you might find that it is necessary to step back and allow some marketing experts to take a look at it. If they can improve your brand in any way, you are bound to find that this will improve your marketing generally, and the performance of your business.

You Don’t Have The Time

Marketing well takes time, and if you just know that you don’t have the time, then that is one of the things that you are going to need to think about. That means that you will benefit greatly from giving your marketing over to the professionals. It is a good idea to make sure that you bear that in mind when the issue of time management crops up and becomes hard to bear. By giving the work to someone else, you can keep your eyes on the prize in other places, and hopefully it will all come together in a business that is functioning much more accurately and expertly.

With an awareness of when you need to get help, you will be able to keep the business operating much more efficiently. Consider this early on if you want to make a big difference in your company.

Should You Hire a Digital Marketing Agency?

/in /by

StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article, Should You Hire a Digital Marketing Agency?

Digital marketing is a vital component of any modern business’ strategy for growth and development. But while many businesses recognize the importance of digital marketing, many of them are still trying to keep their costs down by doing it all themselves. Unfortunately for them, this is a recipe for disaster.

Hiring an outside digital marketing agency might seem like a more expensive option, but it offers a number of advantages.

Access the Skills You Need

Putting together a digital marketing team in-house might seem like a more cost-effective option, but this isn’t true for most businesses. In fact, for the majority of businesses, opening your own digital marketing department is going to be significantly more expensive than hiring a Digital Marketing Agency.

Not only is it difficult and expensive to bring onboard people with the specific skills that you need, these people probably won’t be needed on a continual basis. It is worth having some permanent members of your team who can monitor the progress of any current campaigns and can help you to work on your general marketing strategies. But you should bring in the heavy hitters when you really need them.

Maximize Your ROI

ROI is one of the most important things to consider whenever your business is spending money. It doesn’t matter if you are spending a couple of dollars or hundreds of thousands of dollars, you should always be making sure that money is being spent as wisely as possible and is bringing tangible benefits to your business.

Digital marketing agencies are run and staged by talented and experienced marketers; the people who are best positioned to ensure your campaign is as effective and efficient as it can possibly be. Not only this, but digital marketing agencies will know how to best allocate your available budget for maximum returns.

Gain Insight and Perspective

Any team that you assemble in-house is going to be necessarily limited by the skills and experience they possess. A digital marketing agency will be able to pull in individuals from a variety of backgrounds to ensure that they are bringing everything to the table that your business needs to make a success of your next digital marketing campaign.

Meet Your Deadlines

When you are responsible for your own marketing, there is always a temptation to give yourself a bit more time or a bit more money to achieve your goals. This means that campaigns end up being less disciplined and valuable lessons are never learned.

By contrast, a digital marketing agency will always work to the parameters that you set for them. If you tell them that you need a campaign produced within a certain budget or timeframe, they will work to your specifications.

Hiring a dedicated outside marketing agency will ensure that your business has access to all the skills, knowledge, and resources that it needs to pull off a successful campaign. Don’t be put off by the costs involved; if you want to maximize your ROI from your digital marketing campaigns, an outside agency is a much safer bet than trying to do it all in-house.

Developing A Better Standard Of Marketing

/in /by

StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article |Marketing|Developing A Better Standard Of MarketingDeveloping a better standard of anything is essential when improving your business. Just like a house, it can grow cobwebs, slowly experience a state of disrepair and generally fall to dust should you fail to maintain it. What might work this year might not work the next year. The team you might have now could be stifling your progress, and fresh faces with brand new ideas might be needed to inject life into the firm.

Marketing is perhaps one of the most important elements to update within your business strategy from year to year. Trends, expectations and the means in which customers interface with firms have changed since 2010, and it’s astonishing to realize that was almost ten years ago now.

But how can you develop a better standard of marketing? Doesn’t it take time to read your audience, put together a coherent package, and only then realize that the trend might have been missed? How can you continually stay up to date and elicit awe, not groans, from your audience?

We think the following efforts might help you:

Hire The Professionals

There’s no worth in simply trying to market your brand without knowing your target audience, how they respond to certain stimuli, what you have to say, your goal for the marketing campaign, or how to best reach all avenues of accessibility when exposing a message. It’s essential that you know how to do all this, and for small businesses, that’s a big ask. With services such as Your Marketing People, all of this work can be expertly crafted and specialized, keeping you in the loop at all times. If you manage that, then you can expect to overcome the issues that plague so many first-time business marketing themselves and instead step onto the scene with a cohesive and worthwhile stratagem.

Measure

It’s essential to measure your marketing via every metric through which that can be found. Consider your engagement rates, your sales, where those sales come from, how social media comments reply to your marketing, your YouTube ad dislikes to likes, or perhaps how many ‘follows’ you gain as a result. Without all this information you can repeatedly market to a brick wall even after ten years of business development.

Take A Risk

Every single world can be poured over, copywritten again, approved, discussed, rejected and then the most baseline phrasing chosen if you overanalyze everything. The essence of marketing is being seen, so don’t be afraid to make bold statements, to take a risk, to be bigger and better than the competition. Just imagine if you saw a fragrance advertisement that didn’t feature a half-naked male or female model dressed in silk, filmed in black and white. You’d likely look just because of the originality of the piece in question. Take this ethos and apply it elsewhere, and you might just be exponentially compounding the effect of your marketing prowess.

With this advice, developing a better standard of marketing will be a worthwhile aim.

How To Master Marketing When You’re Brand New

/in /by

StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article |Marketing|How To Master Marketing When You’re Brand NewStarting a business can often be quite daunting. When you’re not a natural entrepreneur or you’ve not had much business experience, you can be fearful of it. But you needn’t be. There’s a lot about business that you can learn as you go along, and this definitely applies to marketing. When you start a small business, you really don’t have to be an expert of professional in order to get results. You just have to be willing to learn and grow. Because as you’re starting to absorb different ideas and tactics, you can try them all out for yourself. Most of the time, you just need to drop the fear and have fun with it instead.

Yet, even when you know you need to do this and you feel willing to step up, you won’t always know how to get started. And that’s only natural – because you’re brand new. So, you’re not expected to be a marketing master right now. But you can be soon. You just need to try out some different ideas, work with different tactics, and get creative too. And you really do need to let it be fun. So, take a look at some of these ideas and see what works for you.

Set Goals

To start with, you need to make sure that you have goals in place. We all need goals. And you need them for different parts of your business – but you definitely need them for marketing. So, ask yourself – what do you want to achieve with your business? What do you long to create? When you write this all down, you’ll find that it’s easier for you to come up with the most suitable campaigns.

Know Your Audience

But then also, you need to make sure that you know your audience incredibly well. Because you have to remember that your business isn’t about you. It’s about them. Serving them, creating something for them. And if you’re going to be able to promote what you do and market to your audience effectively, you’ll need to know your audience well. So make sure that you know exactly who you’re talking to, and what they need.

Do Some Research

From here, you then need to make sure that you’re doing research – and enough of it. You don’t have to spend weeks and weeks on this, however. The aim is to just get enough knowledge of the areas of marketing that you know nothing about. You don’t need to become an expert, as you’re going to learn a ton as you go along.

Consider Working With Professionals

Next up, you may want to think about working with different professionals to help you here. Maybe you don’t want to do it all alone, or you feel as if you could use the help of experts in your industry. Whether this is finding a specialist PR person, a team that knows franchise marketing, or a consultant in your field, take a look around. You may find that working with professionals is exactly what you need here.

Identify The Right Platforms

If you’re going it alone, or even if you’re working with a few professionals, the next thing that you need to do here is work out which platforms you’re going to be on. And this isn’t about the ones you want to be on. But rather those that you know your audience is on, and that you feel you can connect with them on. Because that’s the winning formula here. Remember, it’s about them.

Set Up Social

When you’ve made that decision, you need to set up your social profiles. And there’s a way that you can go about it. You could think about setting up the bare bones of the profiles on each platform, then creating your strategy. Or, you could look to master one platform first, find your feet with it and connect with your audience, and then move on to the next.

Aim For Engagement

But now you need to make sure that you’re using your social platforms properly. It’s not enough to just get set up or to start talking. You need to be doing more than that. You need to engage your customers on social media, and connect with them. You need to get in front of the right people and start to build relationships with them. It isn’t a numbers game. It’s a quality over quantity thing every single time.

Master Your SEO

If you’re not already concentrating on your own SEO, it’s time to do exactly that. Because it’s simple, especially with an SEO guide. Sometimes, something with a fancy title can scare you. But when you step back and learn the basics of SEO, you’ll realize that things are starting to come together. By just using the right words and aiming to get your best content out there on the web, you’ll start to appear in searches properly.

StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article |Marketing|How To Master Marketing When You’re Brand NewTry Something Paid

At some point, you’ll also want to try out something paid. And this can be fun. You may often find that there’s only so far you can get with your organic activity, and that at some point you’ll need to run ads. But whether you do this with paid search or paid social, it’s down to your own data.

Push Your PR

The next thing that you’ll want to be able to do here, is really push your PR. And no, you do not need a PR professional to support you here, you can absolutely do your own PR. You just need to be consistent with it, know what constitutes a good story, and start to put things out into the media. Stay on top of it, and watch buzz for your business start to grow.

Harness WOM

From here, you’re then going to want to make sure that you start to harness the power of conversation. Never underestimate the power of recommendations. If you do a good job and you know that your customers love you, they’ll be more than happy to recommend you. And there are plenty of strategies that you can go for here, but you just need to be authentic and truthful to yourself. And your customers will start to do the rest.

Work With Your Data

Above all else, you need to make sure that you’re always checking in with your data. If you know that you want to go with decisions that’ll pay off and allow you to connect more, you need to look at your own results and data, and go from there.

Be Creative

Finally, you’re then going to want to make sure that you’re being as creative as you can when it comes with your different ideas. Don’t just follow the crowd. It’s cool to come up with different campaigns and to go with new and exciting tactics to get your business out there. Try to let yourself be as creative as possible and come up with fun ideas because of it. You’ll see you get better results when you do.

To summarise, when you’re new to the world of business marketing can seem confusing. It’s also something that has the potential to make you feel vulnerable. However, it doesn’t have to. Because as you can see, there are a wealth of ideas that you can turn to in order for things to work out for you. Just handpick some of the different options and see what kind of success you can make because of it.