Did you know that for 89% of marketers, the effectiveness of digital marketing is increasing? This means their strategy is working, but this isn’t the case for 11% of marketers.
For the losing crowd, their strategy might have already reached its peak. For others, their strategy might be failing.
If you belong in this percentage, you must review your strategy again to see what’s going wrong.
However, how do you know if you’re a part of the 11% in the first place? What are the signs that your sales and marketing strategy is failing?
Read below to see the warning signs your strategy is failing you and see what you can do about it.
1. You’re Not Too Sure About Your Sales and Marketing Strategy
Can you explain your strategy to an employee or your boss? If you can’t clearly explain your goals, your process and your metrics, your strategy isn’t refined enough.
You’ll likely have to go back to square one to make your strategy more functional. Make sure you know who your audience is and what your goals are.
Then, outline the steps you plan to take to get there. Don’t forget to include how you plan to track your results.
2. You’re Losing Customers to Cheaper Alternatives
One of the most telling marketing signs your campaign isn’t working is a loss of customers. When your customers jump ship as soon as they see a cheaper alternative, it means you’re not doing a good job in marketing the value of your products and services.
They don’t see these as worth the extra cost. You can attribute this to poor quality services and products. But if you’re confident that you have superior offerings, which explains the higher price, then the only reason left why you’re losing customers is that you’re not highlighting your superiority well.
Revisit your marketing strategy and incorporate the emphasis of your strong points. What customers will want to hear is what makes your product or service worth the extra cost. If you have a good sales and marketing strategy, you’ll be able to convince them.
3. You’re Not Attracting Customers
You may not be losing customers, but if you’re not gaining new ones, then you may have a bad marketing strategy. If your strategy isn’t getting new customers, then what’s the point?
The reason this happens can be the same as above. You’re not communicating the value of your brand in a way that the audience will understand.
Another reason is that your target consumers don’t even know about you. Do more research about where your customers are.
Are they on Facebook, Snapchat, or somewhere else? How do they interact with the stores they patronize?
Once you find out these things, you can better position yourself.
4. You Have Bad PR
Word of mouth (WOM) is a huge part of marketing. It’s so huge that it accounts for 13% of consumer sales. This also amounts to $6 trillion in annual consumer spending.
One good reason for this is that consumers are more likely to trust a friend or a family member than a paid ad. What happens if their friends tell them not to buy from you?
Therefore, you shouldn’t overlook this part of your marketing strategy. Strengthen your PR by communicating with your customers and solving their problems.
Sometimes, this may be the only flaw in a strategy. Improving customer relations should then bring the results you were expecting.
5. You’re Not Seeing an Uptick in Engagement
Your strategy should include content that your customers will want to engage with. In your social media marketing campaign, for example, you want your target audience to comment, like, and share your content. How often they do this is a marker of the effectiveness of your campaign.
If no one is commenting, liking, or sharing your posts, you are failing.
It means you’re not creating content that applies to them. A reason is that you don’t have the correct persona for your audience. Study your buyer personas again to target them better with your content.
If that’s not the problem, then the issue may lie in your content strategy.
6. Your Posts are Self-Promotional
Look at all your content. What are they about?
If they’re all about you, that may explain why you’re not getting the results you want.
People want content that adds value. With all the surrounding advertisements, the last thing they need is an ad in the guise of useful content.
You can always relate the content to your products and services. If you’re in the roofing industry, for example, publish posts about how they can take care of their roofs.
7. You Have No Idea About Latest Trends
If you often find yourself surprised about the latest developments, that’s not a good sign for your sales and marketing strategy. It might mean you’re not taking into account the recent events.
This will make you lose the opportunity to engage with your audience through what they’re interested in at the moment. Sometimes, it may make you appear distant, too.
Tie the latest trends into your content. If there’s a typhoon coming, for example, post an article about how to ensure their roofs can handle it.
8. You Have a Low Conversion Rate
Even if you’re getting engagements, are you getting leads? Are those leads turning into sales?
You can say that conversion is the measure of your strategy’s effectiveness. If it’s low, it only means there’s something wrong with your strategy.
First, check your CTA. It may be missing or it’s ineffective.
The CTA is what encourages your audience to take the first step into becoming your customer. It tells them what to do to get what they want, such as signing up or buying a product.
If it’s not clear what they should do next, they’ll choose inaction as their next step.
If your CTA is fine, check your landing page. It may be what’s confusing the customers and what’s turning them away from your site.
9. You Have a High Bounce Rate
If the customer exits your website without further interacting with it, like visiting another page or clicking a link, that’s considered a bounce. A high bounce rate then means your visitors aren’t interested in doing any further action on your site.
This can mean a few things. It may be because your content took too long to load, so they instead went to look for another website. Note that you have to keep your load times under 3 seconds as recommended by Google.
Another reason could be that your landing page is bad. It may be full of ads, or it might be too confusing to navigate.
Address such issues first and see if that improves your bounce and conversion rates.
10. Your Website is Receiving Less Traffic
You may not have a high bounce rate, but that may be because you’re not receiving much traffic. In this case, assess your SEO strategy.
SEO is all about improving your organic ranking in the search results. If you have a good SEO strategy, your target audience should see your website and click on it.
If you’re not seeing an increase in traffic, it may be because of a poor strategy that’s keeping you on the bottom of the rankings. Check all aspects of your SEO, including the content, keywords, metadata, and more.
You may also build other programs to increase the traffic to your website. You may, for example, implement a referral program that will give incentives to existing customers who refer new customers.
11. Your Sales and Marketing Teams Communicate Poorly
Companies with bad marketing strategies may also have a problem with their sales and marketing teams. They might not be communicating the goals and processes effectively.
They should work toward the same goal, but if they don’t work together, they may take different paths to get there. The marketing team may not be giving important information, for example, to the sales team.
In this scenario, both teams fail, which means your business fails, too.
12. You Don’t Know Your Real ROI
If someone asks you how your strategy is doing, will you be able to provide an answer in dollars? If not, it means you don’t have an effective way to measure your results in terms of ROI.
At the end of the day, ROI is all that matters. No matter how good the strategy is at getting leads, if it’s not producing a high ROI, it’s still a bad strategy.
Review your strategy with your ROI in mind, and you may pinpoint the flaws in your strategy.
Know When to Hire an Expert Marketing Team
Sometimes, you’ve done all you can do, but your sales and marketing strategy still isn’t seeing results. In that case, you must get the help of professionals. Let’s talk about your strategy today, and feel free to check out our other articles to learn more about marketing.