Why marketing campaigns fail
May 4, 2020
Reputational Capital
September 2, 2020
Most businesses just starting out with digital marketing fail. Why?
No matter how much time and money you put into your campaigns things won’t work if the foundation of your marketing campaign is built wrong.
Not to worry, you’re not alone! According to recent surveys done, it’s been reported that over 88% of start-ups fail in their digital marketing campaigns.
2020 Surveys: Why marketing campaigns fail
It primarily constitutes that 19% of start-ups will completely fail in their business and only 69% are successful. The truth is, there’s numerous reasons why businesses fail in digital marketing.
It all stems from a lack of knowledge or a lack in understanding their true target audience’s needs and desires. The solution is not spending more money on campaigns, spending more money on something that isn’t working typically leads to losing more money.
Primarily, modern businesses are working tirelessly to leverage digital strategies such as Search Engine optimization, Social media, email marketing and website promotion to cultivate and enhance their brand identity and user engagement.
To its core, digital marketing is utilizing multiple avenues to fulfil the overall digital marketing goal your business has. In this article we will highlight the reasons why businesses fail but also provide you with solutions to fix your marketing campaigns so that you ultimately gain a positive ROI on your campaigns.
First, let’s look at the primary reasons why Digital campaigns fail
High Expectations
Most businesses are inclined to compare their success ratio to that of a different business whether that business is a competitor or not. They try and duplicate campaigns they deem successful, and that’s where the problems arise.
These businesses tend to forget that there are many reasons behind the success of someone’s digital marketing strategy, but we cannot expect the same entitlement for every digital marketing start-up.
Inadequate measurement of cost per procurement
You should always keep in mind that a successful digital marketing campaign constitutes of data-driven aspects that makes them more effective and sustainable. These sets of data are not acquired over-night; it takes some time to accumulate these data points.
The amount of traffic that flows to your website is important, however measuring your conversion rate vs your traffic will give you a clear indication of how effective your campaign was. Likewise, if the cost per procurement isn’t measured previously, you will most likely overspend and waste your precious money in order to manage the finances of your digital marketing start-up.
Neglecting the power of Content
Content has proved to be the force that drives digital marketing campaigns. Quality content is an important ingredient to encourage content marketing strategies in your start-up business. Research suggests that 43% of businesses fail due to neglecting the essence and importance of quality content.
Primarily, you can’t substitute the impact of content marketing with other strategies. Businesses tend to forget about the maintenance that’s involved on their website or blogs. By sharing your blogs, guest posts and relevant content on your social media platforms this will give you an insight of attaining visitors that assists you to generate a huge amount of ROI based upon traffic insights that lifts your business to the next level.
Failing to understand the needs of their target audience
Businesses tend to “win” the race before they even start running it. In other words, businesses come up with the latest digital marketing strategies and focus on the monetary gains, but forget that all of those tactics are useless without understanding one’s target audience in-depth.
Without understanding these fundamentals, your business is shooting in the dark. This interactive information consists of comprehensive demographic trends and it’s vital as it will provide you the foundation of effective digital marketing campaigns for your business.
Excessive use of digital marketing channels
The general idea out there is that by using all of the available channels, one gets a huge amount of exposure which ultimately leads to sales. While some of it is true, your brand needs to take into consideration factors such as brand consistency and reliability. Businesses don’t scale out their expansion, they slap all of their products/services into one mix and use social media channels to create awareness.
As mentioned above, once you understand who your target audience is, you’ll know where they are spending their time at online. If the bulk of your audience primarily uses Facebook, then running ads on Instagram wouldn’t make any sense.
Fix your marketing campaigns
Fix 1: Explain your story
Your business story doesn’t have to be as long as a J.K Rowling book. You can describe who you are, what you do and how you do it, in a few sentences. The biggest marketing mistake businesses make is that they don’t explain what they do.
If your visitors don’t get what you are offering, they won’t buy from you. You can solve this problem by making use of video material or a short, well written and concise block of text. Just remember to be clear with you brand message.
Fix 2: Give your audience time to buy
As business owners, we all want to sell to our visitors. What is important to learn, however, is when to sell to them.
There are three main groups of people that visit your website:
- Buyers – people who are interested in buying from you.
- Window shoppers – people who are looking and don’t intend to buy.
- Potential customers – people who want to learn more, but who are not ready to make a purchase just yet.
Types of audience groups
You need to learn to sell to people over time. Get their email and then get people to come back to your site when they are ready to buy. E-commerce sites usually gives out free coupons in exchange for emails, B2B companies such as Hubspot, do this by offering you white papers and kits in exchange for your email.
Once you have them you’ll need to create an email drip sequence through which you send people a series of marketing emails until they convert into customers.
Fix 3: Never forget about your Call to Action (CTA)
Although this is a simple element to a web page, it’s something business owners slip up on.
Below is a list of elements your business needs to test before deploying a call to action:
- Button copy – Crazy egg increased conversion rate with over 20% by switching their button copy to “Show me my heatmap”
- Button colours – SAP increased their conversion rate by over 32% by switching their call-to-action button to the colour orange.
- Location – placing your button below the fold may convert better than above. You’ll have to test different locations.
- Design – placing credit card symbols, trust symbols or even your product around your calls to action may help boost conversion rates.
- Time – showing your calls to action right away may distract visitors from reading your story. You’ll have to test when to introduce it within your landing pages.
- Be creative – your calls to action can be anything, they don’t have to be buttons on a page.
- Use psychology – Ramit Sethi the founder of growthlab.com tested an interesting concept: he got people to click on his call to action by telling them “Don’t click”.
Fix 4: Optimize for a lifetime value not in session ROI
Your customer’s lifetime value is the amount your customer is worth to your business throughout his/her whole life cycle.
Marketing channels aren’t cheap, and their cost will continue to rise over time. Instead of optimizing for profitability right away, you should optimize for a profitable lifetime value. This will allow you to spend more on your marketing efforts and compete with the giants in your industry.
Fix 5: Optimize for conversions
As we mentioned earlier in the article, marketing channel costs will keep rising no matter what you do. At the end of the day, search engines such as Google also needs to make a profit. Yet marketers keep focusing the majority of their efforts on trying to fine-tune their campaigns and reduce their costs.
Instead of spending all of your precious time on fine-tuning your campaigns try and spend 25% of your time optimizing your conversion rates. An increase in the conversion rate by 50% means that your cost to acquire a customer goes down by 50%. This is how you can combat the constantly increasing prices in ad buys.
Modern businesses are working tirelessly to leverage digital to cultivate and enhance their brand identity and user engagement. Don’t waste your valuable time or money by creating campaigns that won’t convert. Rather focus on spotlighting your marketing problems Once you have identified your problem areas, start applying the fixes.
Still not sure what to do next? Our team at Best Web Design would love to help you. Our team of professional experts can help your business stay relevant in a very competitive market place by helping your business make the most of your digital marketing efforts and your budget.
We believe in Quality over Quantity in all aspects of business, therefore our aim is to provide value for every Rand you spend with us!
Contact us now to find out how our team can help you take your company’s digital marketing to the next level in 2020. If you liked this article, please feel free to share and link to it. We look forward to hearing from you.
