Why Your Marketing Isn’t Working (And How to Fix It)

Marketing can be a complicated venture, with many professionals having different opinions on what sells their business best and what appeals most to the audience. This can not only lead to conflict in the boardroom, but can also mean your marketing efforts are very often hit and miss, or not effective at all.

But with many companies increasing their budgets in this area, it's more important than ever for businesses to be investing their time and money wisely. The market has become more saturated, making it more of a challenge for brands to stand out and get noticed against their competitors.

So how can you fix your marketing problems and ensure you have an effective strategy?

Redefine your strategy

Coming up with a marketing strategy can be a long and difficult process. This is because the most effective ones will be the result of trial and error, with data being collected from each campaign. This information can then be used to refine your strategy and heavily influence your subsequent marketing efforts.

If you're not doing this, it's unlikely that all your hard work is paying off. Some professionals aren't even sure what their marketing strategy is, meaning that it's difficult to ensure your efforts are cohesive but also to identify what success looks like for your company.

Even if you've struck lucky and experienced some success so far, it'll be incredibly challenging to build on this or even replicate it in the future without a solid strategy. You may have an idea of what you want to achieve, such as posting original content on social media three times a week, but if this isn't part of a bigger online strategy it's unlikely to be consistently successful.

You need to make sure that every element of your digital marketing strategy provides something that your audience wants or needs. This involves considering the consumer journey and online behavior of your personas, data analytics, and how each part addresses the pain points of your customers.

Data, data and more data

If your strategy is being ineffective, then you need to look at data analytics to identify the areas where it is weak. If you want to increase your lead-to-revenue performance from marketing, for example, then looking at Google Analytics will allow you to see the level of traffic coming to your website and how many of these are converting into actual customers.

This will help you understand your consumer behavior and potentially where you are losing the sale. If you need to get more insight on your customers then you can gather further information about them by sending surveys for them to complete. With this data, you can adjust your marketing strategy to meet your goals; whether this is keeping visitors engaged, persuading them to convert or encouraging loyalty and advocacy from current customers.

Estimating the value of marketing can be difficult and it can be a challenge to identify the exact revenue coming from leads that have been generated, but by treating it like any other area of business, you can build on your previous successes and eliminate potential problems.

Prioritize your time (and money)

The Pareto Principle of economics focuses on the 80/20 rule, meaning that you should invest 80% of your time on the most lucrative customers. Personas that are worth much more to your business should get more of your time when it comes to marketing. Although it may not be an exact 80/20 split, the Pareto Principle helps businesses understand that not all potential customers - or existing ones - are equal.

However, this doesn't mean that you should drop the quality of your marketing efforts or completely neglect one persona. It's just a helpful way to help prioritize your time and see which customers you should invest in and, more importantly, which ones are a waste of time and money.