Marketing is essential for attracting customers. Most companies understand the basics, however when implementing a marketing strategy it can often be a bit of a mess. Below are a few signs that your marketing strategy could need some improvement.
You Don’t Do Any Research
Don’t just base your marketing off of your own intuition - especially if you don’t have any experience in marketing. There are tricks to things like social media marketing, email marketing and SEO that require research. Take the time to research marketing tactics at blogs such as this one owned by Joey Armstrong. This could prevent you from making rookie mistakes.
Make sure that you’ve also researched exactly who your audience are and what types of marketing tactics appeal to them. Consider consumer surveys, focus groups and competitor research.
You Don’t Plan Ahead For Your Marketing
It’s worth planning your marketing ahead rather than being spontaneous with marketing ideas. For example, you may have a great idea for a social media post or a great idea for a blog post - before you post it, consider whether now is the best time to publish it. You could get more leads by scheduling your post for a specific day and time when more people are likely to be online.
Planning ahead isn’t just good for targeting key times - it can also give you time to research and prepare. Whether you’re creating a video advert or putting on a marketing event, it’s useful to have lots of time to prepare so that you can make it as successful as possible. If you only give yourself a couple weeks - or worse a couple days - your marketing strategy will be rushed.
You’re Not Tracking Performance
It’s important that you take time to assess the performance of your marketing strategies. If you’ve launched a PPC advertising campaign, you ideally want to be able to tell who clicked on your ad and how many of them converted into leads. This can help you to determine whether or not to run the advert again and what improvements you may want to make to your next campaign.
Analytics can be used to track the performance of many digital marketing strategies. When it comes to offline marketing strategies, there may be other ways of tracking performance such as using follow-up surveys (such as asking people who attended your marketing conference to give feedback via email).
You’re Trying To Target Too Many Marketing Channels
While it can be worth dabbling in different types of marketing, you should try to keep a focus on a few specific types of marketing so that you’re not spreading your time and resources too thin. When getting involved in social media marketing, don’t try to conquer every social media platform unless you’ve got dedicated staff members that can do it for you. Instead, use your time to focus on specific social media sites that are likely to have the best results. For example, if you run a cake making business, it might make sense to focus on image-heavy sites like Instagram and Facebook.
These tips should keep your marketing strategy optimized and organized leading to much better results!