Business leaders understand the value of building a robust marketing strategy. Diversifying content across social media, email and your website is essential for growth.
Despite knowing the importance of keeping customers interested in them, many brands still struggle to develop a proper strategy. Between all the various platforms and tools, it seems nearly impossible to tell when your marketing strategy isn't cutting it.
To determine if you need to change your marketing strategy, keep your eye out for common red flags. We are going to explore some of these signs and offer some actionable suggestions to give your marketing strategy a makeover if it needs one.
Let's get started!
1. Rapidly declining website traffic
Many new websites struggle to generate traffic to their website. If you are in this situation or, worse, once had a large following that tapered off, you may need to rethink how you market your products and services.
Customers depend on your business to provide high-quality products that deliver on the promises you or your marketing team made. If you're not living up to these expectations, there's a good chance that once-frequent visitors will leave your site and not come back.
So, how can you fix this problem?
There are several solutions. While this is not quite a marketing issue, first check your website's performance. Is it loading within two seconds? Are any of your images broken? Is your site optimized for mobile devices? All these factors can play a role in customers' perception of your brand. Consequently, it can also determine how often people visit your website.
If all your speed and performance tests check out, it's time to start thinking about your marketing strategy. You can flesh out your products' or services' benefits, collect testimonials to build trust with new visitors, or add new ways for consumers to engage with your brand.
2. More people unsubscribing from your emails
Email marketing is an effective way to grow your business and connect with your audience. Many marketers and business owners use this platform to deliver content and offers to subscribers.
Have you noticed an increasing trend of people unsubscribing from your mailing list? This could be a sign that your email marketing strategy is lacking. You should expect to see some people unsubscribe, but the percentage of people leaving can give you more insight.
For context, the average email open rate is 22.86%, with a click-through rate of 3.71%. If you have an abnormally large number of people unsubscribing, but your open and click-through rates are where they should be, you may want to wait before making drastic changes.
But if your open rate and CTR are down, and unsubscribes are up, this could indicate a problem with your email strategy. You may want to consider personalization techniques to keep subscribers interested in your brand, or you could tone down your emails if you've been overly ambitious with them. Consumers don't like getting emails from businesses every day, or even every other day.
Spend some time creating a newsletter, with variations for your different customer segments, and send one out weekly. This could reduce the mental overload some consumers feel and discourage them from unsubscribing.
3. Lack of social media engagement
Now let's talk about signs your social media marketing strategy is failing. The biggest tell is a lack of engagement on your posts. By engagement, we mean comments, shares and likes. There are also other variables to consider, depending on the platform you're measuring. YouTube creators, for example, correlate watch time with engagement.
These actions signify that a follower saw your post and enjoyed what you had to say. When you consider that 49% of the global population uses social media, little to no engagement means that you're not resonating with the people you want to check out your website.
If you're in this position, don't worry. You can quickly turn this situation around. The first thing we suggest is making sure you're connecting with your target audience on social media. In many cases, a lack of engagement occurs because the business is connecting with the wrong audience.
Research the people you think will benefit from your product or service, and refine the content you share on social media around those personas. If you share relatable content and reach your audience, you should see a steady increase in engagement. This statement carries more weight when you consider that the average social media user spends two hours and 22 minutes a day on various social platforms.
Social media is one of those platforms where you get out what you put in. You have to spend time engaging with the people who do bother to comment on your posts if you want to continue seeing engagement from those followers.
4. Poor conversions on forms
Website forms are often one of the best ways to grow your business. You can use these tools to generate more sales, email subscribers and engagement. The key to success is getting conversions on your forms.
Poor conversions on forms can mean several things, but they all boil down to one idea: Your strategy could use some work. Small changes to your forms can have significant results. For instance, did you know that forms with three fields see a 25% conversion rate, while forms with six or more fields only see a conversion rate of 15%?
That might not seem like a big deal at a glance, but depending on your business's size, this could cost you thousands of dollars in an extremely short window of time. Limit your form fields to collect the crucial information from visitors. If you want to obtain more data, add one optional question at the bottom of the form.
There are other ways to improve your form conversion rate. Another smart method is to reward consumers for filling out your form. You could encourage users to subscribe to your email list to receive a hefty discount on their first purchase. You could offer similar incentives to encourage users to participate in your feedback survey.
5. Trouble articulating your strategy
The final sign that your marketing strategy needs a makeover is that you struggle to explain your plan to other people. Try to verbalize your marketing strategy in plain English. If you're struggling to describe how you generate traffic and sales, it's time to rethink your technique.
A good marketing strategy is both simple and effective. If you can't explain your process, it's probably too complicated. Think of ways to simplify your strategy while improving relationships with customers.
The tips we've offered today will help you build rapport with your audience and, hopefully, give you something to think about moving forward. You can overcome the barriers that arise when growing your business. Identifying your areas of opportunity and building on that foundation will help you find success.