10 Signs You Need a Marketing Strategy
A solid marketing plan is essential to your success, no matter what you sell or how small your business is. Delivering your ideal customer so much value they want to become a paying customer or client is the primary goal of marketing. Keeping this top of mind is how to stay focused on growing your business. Use this marketing mantra as a reminder - ‘How can I deliver more value today?’
There are many different approaches to marketing that can resonate with your ideal customer. There are many different avenues for delivering value. Like all things marketing, you have to test, quantify, and measure to ensure you’re making the progress you’re expecting along the way. And because you don't want to throw good money after bad, it's wise to check in on your marketing efforts frequently to be sure they're yielding the desired results.
You can't afford to wait until it's too late to develop, or re-strategize, your marketing approach.
It's essential to understand why your current marketing efforts are not delivering or connecting with your audience.
Here are ten easy signs that your business needs a marketing strategy or needs to consider developing a new one.
1. Your Business Isn’t Growing Like It Should
If your business growth has slowed or stopped, and you are getting only a few new inquiries, you need a marketing strategy. Intentionally not seeking new business while operating at total capacity is one thing. Still, those in a similar position whose income has remained flat or declined should examine their marketing strategies.
Creating a marketing plan will help you figure out what you need to do better if you're not seeing growth in your company. It will help you zero in on the source of the problem and solve it there. You can hire a fractional-CMO (chief marketing officer) to direct you about creating a marketing strategy.
2. Your ROI Isn’t Up To The Mark
It's natural to want to see some return on your marketing efforts, but it's important to consider whether you're optimizing your ROI. To answer this question, you must calculate your cost per acquisition (CPA) - the amount it costs to gain just one new client.
If you keep tabs on the results of your advertising efforts, you'll undoubtedly notice that some channels perform better than others. Your objective should be to increase your customer base while decreasing acquisition costs which you can only achieve with purpose-driven marketing.
You can determine the actual return on investment by comparing outcomes across channels and campaigns to ascertain which approaches are most successful. If you aren't sure you're getting the best return on investment possible from your marketing, consider hiring a chief marketing officer and making some changes.
3. Paid Marketing Doesn’t Yield Expected Results
PPC advertising has the potential to expand your customer base rapidly, but it may quickly become prohibitively expensive if you need to know what you're doing.
The poor performance of paid advertising campaigns can be attributed to inaccurate targeting, low conversion rates, or exorbitant CPCs. Paid campaigns are more likely to succeed if they are tailored to a specific demographic with relevant messaging.
Whether you're advertising on Google, Facebook, Instagram, or any other platform, you want your ads to be highly targeted to the people you hope to reach with them. While CPCs can range widely, optimizing your campaign for maximum ROI is essential.
To achieve the best possible CPC and return on investment, your full-time or Fractional-CMO should run various tests using combinations of ad groups, keywords, ad copy, targeting, and other variables.
4. You Don't Get Enough Traffic
The absence of any traffic is also a worrying sign. If people aren't visiting your website or other online platforms, your marketing isn’t working.
The fact that your primary marketing channels aren't generating much interest should be an alarm bell that something is wrong with your approach.
You should determine where your customer spends their time online and then use those platforms to drive traffic to your pages. Don’t spend your entire ad budget on facebook if your ideal customer is on LinkedIn. And, don’t create a strategy around platforms or ads that have no chance of connecting with your customer. Choose the platforms that you know will and can deliver.
5. You Struggle To Articulate Your Company's Value
If you can't articulate what makes your company unique and why its services are valuable, you're probably not realizing your full potential. Your organization may also be lacking a success mindset. Or, you might have skipped over brand development work which addresses these questions.
Ask yourself: Does your organization have a well-articulated purpose? If not, you're probably not just reaching your target audience through the wrong mediums, but you might be trying to sell to the wrong people altogether.
The value needs to align with the customer you are speaking to. Your value needs to align with their problems. Not the problems you think they have, but the actual problems they have.
6. You Need Better Knowledge of Campaign Analysis
Checking whether or not your marketing efforts are paying off is a vital part of many of the abovementioned warning signs. Any company with a growth mindset needs to be able to run a campaign analysis. However, if you do not know how to evaluate success, it can become a problem.
Running a campaign and understanding the number of leads or customers it generates isn't enough. You need to collect the data necessary to calculate your cost per acquisition or the income generated. Monitor your campaign's KPIs on every marketing channel you employ.
Your key performance indicators (KPIs) should be based on the measurements you plan to use to evaluate your progress.
● SEO metrics could include visits, time on site, and bounce rates.
● For social media, this may be things like engagement, reach, and impressions.
● Ad metrics could include clicks, cost per click, and CTR.
With the right key performance indicators (KPIs) in place and a method for tracking them, you can determine if your efforts are successful.
7. You're Attracting The Wrong Audience
You can tell you're using the wrong bait if you're trying to catch salmon but only succeeding in catching minnows. When this occurs, it is crucial to know your target demographic and meet them where they are to make an impact.
While adjusting your marketing strategy is not inherently harmful, it is poor not to measure and track to determine when such adjustments are necessary.
8. You're Experiencing A Lack of Conversions
Businesses must be flexible in their marketing strategies. If your marketing efforts are not producing results, that's a major red flag.
The good news is that smaller businesses have an edge in this situation. The best way to understand your customer's needs is to put yourself in their position.
While no one enjoys incessant and cheap selling tactics, shopping is a universal pastime. It's time to change if your strategic marketing isn't informing and exciting your target audience.
9. Your Marketing Message Is Unclear
If the people you are trying to reach repeatedly request that you either explain yourself or put things in their own words, this indicates that the message you are trying to convey isn't going through to them.
We can achieve this goal by adjusting the content of our messaging and how we communicate to cater to the distinct requirements of organizations that range in size and nature.
Ensure your message can be grasped quickly and easily if you want it to be understood.
10. Your Audience Isn't Engaging Or Expanding
In social media marketing, one of the most common blunders companies make is the "post and pray" mentality, in which they dump material out there and hope it attracts the kind of attention the company needs.
To be more precise, brands should provide the material they can predict would be well received by their target demographic. Each social media network has its own metrics and analytics explicitly tailored to its users.
Alter your strategy if you publish content on social media and get no feedback. You should be seeing a return on the effort and money you put into posting, whether you're doing it yourself or have hired a chief marketing officer to do it for you.
If your social media posts aren't resonating with your audience, it's clear that your marketing strategy needs updating.
Making your organization stand out from the crowd requires telling an engaging and compelling story.
Communicating the "why" behind your company is how you connect with an audience. These ten red flags will help you determine whether developing a strategy is a good next step, or if going back to the drawing board makes sense.
