Failed Marketing – Why You Aren’t Getting Results
There are five key reasons a business’ marketing fails, regardless of how much you spend. If you do not have a basic foundation, the correct resources, you do not test enough, you have analysis paralysis or you are just not doing enough ROI assessments, your marketing efforts will fail.
Over the last few years, I have observed businesses spending scandalous amounts of money on marketing. I have also seen several organisations spend this type of money without seeing ANY return on their investment. Shocking!
The amounts here are enormous: £200,000, £300,000 or as much as £500,000 a month spent on marketing!
Despite these huge amounts of money, there were very few leads or sales. Their marketing was failing.
This may sound absurd, but it is happening. I know this to be a fact, as at least once a month a business will contact my company to explain that they have been spending thousands of pounds a month on marketing, ads, tech and are not seeing any results and can we assist?!
The five reasons marketing fails
Collaborating with numerous organisations over the years, I have become aware that the reasons for this generally stem from one or more reasons. See below the five reasons.
1. No Solid Foundations
If you are investing money on marketing without a basic foundation for your brand, you are wasting your money. Not possessing a good foundation means, not having a brand guide in place, little or no market research, no marketing plan or strategy, no website or a website that does not perform very well.
Additional to this, is not having the metrics and KPIs in place, in order to track and understand the data. Understanding what does and doesn’t work. I don’t mean vanity metrics or fancy marketing terms. These are metrics that are fun to talk about at parties or meetings, but they do not reflect the health of your business.
The key points of information are related to, how many total users come to your website, the average user journey and what your bounce rate is.
To have a good foundation, you need to have granular metrics at a page level to fully comprehend the basics of your infrastructure and marketing. This incorporates asking the question: How much of the content is being viewed and read?
The answer to this question can be viewed with a metrics tool (e.g. Hotjar), that provides information such as, the general viewer reads the top 20% of the page or the readers go no further than the banner or landing page. These kinds of metrics are needed to understand why and when you should modify elements of your website in order to maximise conversion.
2. Lack of Resources
We have already discussed resources such as the metrics tools. However, in order to avoid wasting your marketing spend, you will need the correct marketing personnel. For example, an analysis marketing manager. This individual is a pivotal marketing resource, if not the most important marketing resource. This is the individual who is going to inform you all about what works and what doesn’t, and this where you should optimise.
There are additional human resources who can holdback your marketing efforts. Maybe you have not got enough marketers to develop original content or perhaps the people you have are not great at developing long – form content. It could be that you do not have anyone exceptionally good or entirely dedicated to design creation work.
3. You have Analysis Paralysis
Analysis paralysis is when you observe something that is not working, and you and a few other people end up deliberating amongst yourselves about what is not working and why. However, nothing actually gets done about it. This situation only leads to wasted time, money and effort. If something isn’t working, you need to try to fix it. It is essential you remove that block.
4. Not Experimenting, Measuring & Adapting
Marketing is all about trial and error. Several people develop their website and social media accounts and that’s it. It rarely alters or gets the attention it needs or deserves. Which is not sufficient enough!
The fact of the matter is you should be working on conversion optimisation at every step of the buyer’s journey.
This can be through your website, email marketing, social media or face to face interactions.
Each individual touchpoint with your customer will need examining and tweaking. It is only then you will find out what works and what does not.
It is pointless doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
5. Not Doing ROI Analysis
The majority of marketers allocate their budget evenly across different marketing channels. They spend it equally across all types of marketing, such as SEO, content and conferences/ exhibitions etc.
However, what they should do, (but don’t tend to do) is individually examine each element. If you are spending your marketing budget on social media, but it is not functioning well, then place the money elsewhere. Switch up the budget to align with the people who are interacting with your brand and go to where they are. Allocate more resources to winning tactics and less on loss leaders.
Conclusion
So, here are the 5 main reasons businesses spend far too much on marketing and still fail. If you can steer clear of falling into these traps, you will be able to obtain a better ROI and stop throwing money at the wall.
Have you observed these 5 marketing fails in your own business? Get in touch with us today and let us help you to reduce marketing spend and improve your conversions.