6 Reasons Your Marketing Strategy Isn’t Working

6 Reasons Your Marketing Strategy Isn’t Working

Marketing is the lifeblood of your business, but it’s not foolproof. If you’re not keeping close track of your strategy, your execution, and your results, you’re just pouring money down the drain. If you’ve been spending on marketing and not seeing results, here are a few things that might be going wrong.

1. Your Goals Aren’t Realistic

Setting goals is important. They keep you on the right track toward forward progress, giving you something to compare yourself to and letting you know whether you’re getting better. But even more important is creating goals that are calibrated properly.

Your goals need to strike a balance. If they’re too easy, then meeting them doesn’t mean anything. If they’re too hard, then you’ll consistently fail to hit them and morale will suffer. Goals need to be based on progress you’ve made in the past, then adjusted as needed to stay relevant.

Goals should also be SMART:

• Specific: your goals need to be based on precise areas of improvement
• Measurable: if you can’t assign a number to it, it’s not a measurable goal
• Attainable: as we mentioned in the last section, goals that are too lofty are just going to make you feel bad if you miss them
• Relevant: make sure the goal you’re choosing is actually going to make your company better at what you do
• Time-bound: a goal without a deadline isn’t creating any urgency to meet it

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If you can start setting better benchmarks for your marketing, you’ll have a sense of purpose for your marketing.

2. You’re Not Tracking the Right Metrics

There are a practically infinite number of metrics you can track when it comes to your marketing efforts, but not all of them are useful. We call the less useful ones “vanity metrics,” and they’re easy to get caught up in.

Go through the metrics you’re tracking and really take a deep dive into how useful they are. Are they correlated to real results that bring in money to your company? Are they making you better when the numbers go up? Or are they simply making you look better on the surface without actually bringing about real change?

3. You’re Not Integrating Your Marketing Efforts

Integrated marketing is a natural result of the increasing fragmentation of the marketing world. There are so many channels on so many different mediums these days that it’s nearly impossible to predict where your leads and customers are coming from or in which order they’re going to encounter your materials.

Integrated marketing is all about uniting your various channels into one cohesive campaign, uniting your messaging and branding so that everyone sees the same message no matter where they are. As an added bonus, it allows you to recycle your content so that you can reach a wider audience with the same resources.

4. You Don’t Know Who You’re Targeting

Marketing to the wrong people is a waste of time and resources, so it’s crucially important that you know who the right people are. That means creating buyer personas, one of the most important tools in any marketer’s toolbox.

A buyer persona is an idealized version of your perfect customer. No real customer is likely to live up to this description, but that’s ok. Your buyer personas (and you might need more than one) will contain all the most important information about your customers that pertain to your business, and if you don’t have them, you’ll be spinning your wheels.

5. You’re Not Aligned With Your Partners

Marketing isn’t an island. You need the help of every other department in the organization to succeed — sales, operations, customer success, customer service, and so on. But in order for everyone to work together toward a common goal, you need to be on the same page.

Every department should be meeting on a regular basis to make sure that they know what the company’s goals are. They should also be sharing data after the fact, helping each other to compare the results of your campaigns to see what’s working and what’s not.

6. You’re Not Nimble Enough

If there’s one constant in the marketing world, it’s change. We know, that’s a cliche, but it’s an important thing to keep in mind. Channels come and go. Strategies rise and fall. New metrics arise. And you need to be ready.

Let’s say Google announces a new algorithm update (which they do, fairly frequently). It might completely change the way that your website ranks in search results, so you’ll have to adapt. If you can’t, your traffic could plummet. Staying flexible is crucial in a rapidly changing world.

Talk to the Experts

Marketing isn’t easy, and there’s nothing wrong with asking for help. At Madison Taylor Marketing, we eat, sleep, and breathe marketing. We know every trend, every channel, and every strategy. If your marketing has been struggling and you need help, give us a call.