People often think that their marketing is not working. It’s not doing what it’s supposed to do which fundamentally is to generate more sales and more business.
Sometimes this is because they are not measuring the results and so, oddly, don’t realise that it is working. When a company has been receiving new contacts and enquiries but don’t know where they came from, they probably came from the marketing!
However, attribution back to specific ads or specific campaigns is not always possible. Even in a retail ecommerce brand, where sales can be traced directly back to the Google ad that delivered the customer to the site, the Google ad on its own did not sell the product. It is a combination of the site, the brand, the product, the way it’s talked about, how frictionless the process is, the price, the reviews, the recommendations, the ten other ads that put a name in the customer’s head and the social media they checked out while they were on the site – all of which go together to make that single Google ad get someone to buy at that particular time.
When it comes to business to business, it’s not even that straightforward. Generally, getting contacts from new people, who haven’t been recommended, happens as a result of the overall marketing efforts.
Nevertheless, sometimes it isn’t working at all, or at least not working as well as it should.
So, if the marketing is being measured but isn’t working, it’s usually because of some permutation of the following 5 factors,
The product is not fit for market.
This is a hard one to accept but sometimes what people are trying to sell is just not right for the market. They may have spent years developing a great idea – but spending years on something doesn’t make it fit for market. Plenty of research shows that 80% of products and ideas fail, even when they are developed and delivered by competent people. The price could be too high or too low, so how did was it arrived at? The finance offering might not be right. The basic idea might not be good enough – or what was right 6 years ago might not be right now.
Products can be tested by hypothesising with a simple equation – will X number of people out of Y number of people do Z? So, for example, will 10 people shown the product at a county fair buy it? Will 100 people in every 1000 who visit the website give their email address?
At this point, the fundamental question is, what is the pricing strategy and how was it calculated?
The product is presented wrongly.
This is easier to review by looking at the images, the language, the friction on the site, the way the products are talked about, the brand, the look and feel. Is it right for the company, right for the product and most important, right for the customer?
Complete the ‘people come to us when’ test. Ask the question, ‘people come to us when they need X, and we do Y so they can do Z’ and then assess the product’s presentation against that.
Do the ‘hedgehog’ test. Ask what the company is excellent at? What is the one reason people buy from it, and is that focus shown in presentations?
The targeting is wrong.
If a business is targeting the wrong people, then its marketing will never work. Look at who the customer is, ask what the ideal customer is, and find them. From there, people are picked up on the periphery. Start tight then slowly and carefully work outwards.
Often people’s PPC has become so complex that they can’t actually work out who they are really targeting with which message, so a good technique is the’ smallest viable audience’ test.
For this, work out the minimum number of people who must buy to make the business work. Who are they, what are they, where are they, what do they do and what do they like? Then target them, and them alone,
The marketing mix is wrong.
Most cakes are made by combining roughly the same ingredients with extras being added for different flavours. What differentiates them is the ingredient proportions and the way they are mixed, heated, folded, and cooked. The same is true of marketing – it is a mix of components which, if applied correctly, give a result, and if applied wrongly, make a mess. A common mistake is to spend too much money on brand building, and not enough on customer acquisitions.
Take time to look at the mix, write down what is being done, roughly how much is spent and how many visits to the website are got as a result.
Make sure that the higher proportion of spend is on traffic and not fees, for example.
The timing is wrong.
Marketing is a game of persistence and consistency and it’s hard to get quick results. It’s a game of presenting the right product to the right people consistently over a period of time. Sometimes it’s not working because it is only sporadic. Sometimes because it is too soon. Sometimes money is being spent too quickly – generally, £1000 spent over 3 months will give better results than £1000 spent over 1 weekend.
Sometimes the market is not ready for the product, or the product is not right for the market. It may simply take time for people to understand the offering, or even that the situation is wrong, the time is wrong, and there is very little that can be done about it.