Understand Why Your Marketing is Failing
When investing in marketing, every business owner hopes it brings the desired result. Unfortunately, sometimes reality makes an unpleasant surprise turning out to be a far cry from what you expected. Instead of raising brand awareness, enhancing customer relationships, improving sales, and whatever else you envisioned, marketing efforts can end up with a catastrophic outcome. “Why does my marketing suck” unsuccessful entrepreneurs ask. It’s about time to figure out why your strategy falls short and take actions to reverse this trend.
Reasons For Poor Marketing Performance
There could be many reasons for poor performance on your marketing efforts. From bad timing, insufficient research, incorrect tactics, to targeting the wrong audience. These factors can contribute to unsatisfactory results. If you’re keen on understanding why your campaigns fall flat, you need to start off with a marketing audit.
To put it simply, an audit involves analysis of a company’s strategy, its website and other marketing channels. Its goal is to identify weaknesses as well as possible ways to improve upon the marketing strategy. The audit lets you determine where you stand with your ROI and what you can do to boost it.
Your Time Matters
One thing that most small business owners tend to do is attach little value to their time. Meanwhile, we all know that time is money, so wasting your time equals losing money. If you want to be a successful entrepreneur, do yourself a favor and stop spending time on things that are not important or have little money-yielding potential. This is what you can do to make your business fly high – assign a monetary value to your time and keep track of how much you spend on performing marketing tasks. Such an approach will help you figure out the true cost of what you invest in a marketing promotion.
Business Opportunity Costs
As a small business owner, your time is probably stretched thin among various tasks. Along with that, you might not have large amounts of money to spend on marketing. It comes as no surprise that many businesses attempt to carry out promotion single handedly. The lack of time, money, and knowledge is a volatile combination capable of harming the financial stability of your company.
When doing everything on your own, not only are you taking away time from other necessary business aspects but also expose yourself to risks. There is no magic guidebook to learn marketing in just one day. Therefore, unless you have a degree and experience in this field, your activities will tend to be trails and errors. Do you really have the time or budget to clean up the consequences of ill-considered decisions?
On top of that, if your company is undermanned and overwhelmed, you’ll overlook beneficial marketing opportunities loomed on the horizon. You might miss your chance to get ahead of competitors just because you were too busy with other tasks.
How To Do A Marketing Audit
By and large, a marketing audit compares the results of your efforts with the time and money you spent to achieve it. As a result of this investigation, you can calculate the return on investment. To get a clear and objective picture of your ROI. you can’t lump all your marketing activities together. It is critical that you keep track of the time and money invested in each campaign and marketing channel separately.
For example, if you are running search engine optimization and pay per click marketing campaigns at once, you should bear in mind that these search engine marketing strategies are not the same thing. Therefore, you need to keep track of them separately to find out which is performing better and which has room for improvement.
If you know individual ROI indicators for very individual promotional effort, you can see which actions work the best and which don’t live up to expectations. With this information close at hand, you are able to intensify worthwhile tactics and stop wasting money on things that don’t pay off.
Make A Marketing List
To start the audit, you need to make a list of all the marketing promotions you have done for your company in the past. The next step is to assess how much time it took to implement those, their cost, and profit they generated. With these indicators available, you can clearly see which marketing avenues help your business grow and which efforts went down the tubes.
If you’re making considerable progress with certain marketing campaigns, it’s a good idea to go bigger and use their potential to the max. At the same time, if you’re losing money, you need to figure out what went wrong. It may be that the chosen approach ceased to be effective altogether and you need to abandon it. On the other hand, you might not know how to squeeze out the required performance out of it.
Now That You Can See What’s Working Or Not
Even when your marketing campaign was high-flying, you should still study it to find out whether it’s worth to carry on or not. Ever-changing marketing conditions, competitors’ activities, economic situation, and many other factors may affect your future success. That’s why you should access the potential of running previously beneficial campaigns again and determine the appropriate amount to reinvest in them.
If your marketing efforts underperforms it is a must to figure out why it happens. There are myriads of possible blunders that may cost an arm and a leg in the end. In this list, we outlined the most common mistakes small businesses make:
- don’t have a clear plan on what to do;
- Not enough time spent on marketing;
- don’t give enough time for campaigns to start performing in full swing;
- fail to identify the target audience;
- fall short to deliver the right message;
- don’t provide engaging content;
- use ineffective marketing channels;
- have no analytics to measure effectiveness;
- lack skills and knowledge in marketing.
If you realize that your company is not progressing or you came to the conclusion that your time is better to be spent on other aspects of business, maybe its time to get an expert to help? Luckily, there is no shortage of digital marketing agencies that have the required competence and knowledge to promote your brand in a professional manner.
Choose The Types Of Marketing You Do Wisely
When working with marketing experts in harness, you can receive qualified assistance in developing an adequate strategy. Provided with figures regarding the previous campaigns, they are able to highlight the most beneficial tactics and pinpoint the mistakes to avoid in the future. With competent help on your side, you can stop doing marketing on a whim. Entrust your small marketing promotions to professionals while you can concentrate efforts on other aspects of your business.
If you feel your company needs a kick-start, let Local Dudes handle marketing for you. We offer an extensive set of services to cater to small businesses in the San Diego area and beyond. We can take part in developing a marketing strategy exclusively for your company and help you select spot-on types of promotion.
Types Of Online Marketing
Search Engine Optimization is a beneficial tactics if you are interested in a consistent long-term result. With proper SEO, your digital platform is able to get a foothold on the top of the search results in Google and draw in clients without substantial further investments.
If you demanding quick results it’s best to opt for PPC advertising. Although it requires consistent financing, the high ROI, brand exposure, and a spike in traffic make pay per click one of the most efficient types of digital marketing.
Businesses that have been around for a while are likely to gain a subscriber database. If you have it too, Local Dudes will help you promote among subscribers in the most tactful way via email marketing. If needed, we’ll do our best to ramp up your opt-in list. We can also aid to increase your social media presence and stir hype around your brand.
Leave Room For Experiments
Your marketing strategy ought to be fluid to quickly adopt methods that do a great job and discard tactics that don’t. Keep in mind that no one can predict how a certain type of promotion will perform before you kick off. That’s why you should be ready to try, test, and experiment with your campaigns. If your time and budget permit, you can implement split testing to see how two different approaches work and pick the most beneficial one. Please note that testing is effective only in the short run due to ever-changing marketing conditions. Therefore, you need to be flexible with your strategy and realistic in your expectations.
Reasons To Hire Local Dudes
Our goal is to help small businesses in San Diego and across the entire USA gain marketing success. We are aware of the challenges you face every day and we know how to make the most of your marketing budget. With the specifics of small business in mind, we designed our services to be helpful, productive, and cost-effective.
We have been in digital marketing for 15 years and we know the ins and outs. Along with that, we keep abreast of new trends, method, and technologies to better our practices and offer cutting-edge solutions.
What You Can Expect When Working With US
Whatever type of marketing you decide to do with Local Dudes, it will come with comprehensive reporting on all milestones we achieve. Detailed tracking information brings an objective touch to performance measuring and helps monitor how your campaigns are doing. Use our marketing services and you’ll be riding on the crest of a wave and never look back.
