Signs that your marketing is outdated

If you are a small to medium-sized business owner who feels like they are treading water, you need to pay attention to the words that you are about to read. Over 90% of small businesses fail within their first three years of operation, with many more that survive actually struggling, rather than seeing growth.

You want to be a part of the 3% of companies that actually ‘make it’, but you won’t be in that number if you are implementing ineffective or outdated marketing strategies that affects your business’s lead generation strategy. Here are a few things that you should be looking out for.

Your business’s marketing efforts aren’t growing in scale.

If you talk to any savvy marketer, they will say that any marketing activities that the business implements should help the business grow in size. There are times when marketers get comfortable by relying on traditional marketing channels that have always worked. For example, many businesses that were listed in the Yellow Pages directory failed to take action when search engines came along and actually provided web users with an instant directory listing. Many of those businesses realised their error too late and were playing catch up to their competitors many years afterwards.

It’s important that your marketing activities are monitored and that the person or team that is responsible for your organisation’s marketing can identify new growth opportunities for the business.

You aren’t tracking conversions as well as you should.

The more guesswork there is in your marketing, the more ineffective your marketing efforts will be. John Wanamaker famously said, “I waste half of my marketing budget. The only problem is that I don’t know which half!”

Several business owners can identify with him.

Whether they are doing direct mail, Adwords, SEO, display advertising or another form of marketing, they will often invest in marketing channels to drive conversions, but they won’t actually optimise their funnel and conversion tracking so that they know exactly which marketing activities are effective.

There’s a famous marketing line that says, “What you can’t track, you cannot manage.” Ensure that you set up tracking for all of your online and offline marketing campaigns.

Your ad spend is being wasted.

Wasted advertising spend is a big problem in marketing.

There’s a strong emphasis to get the lead or the sale, but it shouldn’t be at a ridiculous cost. This occurs because marketers target unqualified people. For example, many search engine marketers who run campaigns on Adwords will start implementing a campaign that targets a broad audience. Hundreds, thousands or even millions of dollars gets wasted due to ineffective ad targeting. The cost of the customer acquisition increases and profits diminish.

To avoid this, research your business’s ideal customer and target them with laser-like precision. Don’t just invest in marketing efforts blindly.

Your website doesn’t convert as well as you think it should.

Many business owners complain about not getting enough leads or sales, but if you look at their website for 10 seconds, you can see exactly why it isn’t converting. Your website needs to be a conversion machine and the only way you can improve this is by doing conversion rate optimisation across the webiste. Without it, you will spend a lot more on advertising and find it difficult to gain sales.

Optimise your site for conversions by improving the sales copy, website design and call to actions. A small investment can yield thousands or even millions of dollars in revenue over the long-term.

Develop a sales system that improves the trust and credibility of your brand.

We operate in an age where there is a lot of transparency and people can easily give their business to a competitor with a single click. One of the ways to stand out from the competition is by forging a strong relationship with your customer and turning them into advocates of your brand. This can be achieved by educating and caring for them. This will encourage them to refer your business.

It’s important to keep an eye on your business’s marketing tactics to see what is working effectively and ineffectively. Take the time to sit down and review the activities that you are doing and see where you are getting the best ROI.