5 warning signs your marketing isn't working

by Helen Sheplyakova Blogger

Marketing is one of the things that keep businesses alive and provides them with the driving force - active customers willing to make that vital purchase and hopefully come back. However, developing a highly effective marketing strategy and carrying out a successful campaign is quite tricky. More often than not, you can't predict the customers' reaction to your marketing efforts and determine if they're worth spending money on before you actually launch that campaign and receive the first feedback from the customers.

Obviously, you shouldn't expect a TV ad or an online advertising campaign bring your a flow of new customers right away. Each marketing tool needs some time to produce its positive effect. However, you should always monitor the customer activity to be able to spot the ineffectiveness of a certain marketing plan/activity, introduce necessary changes or even cancel that thing to stop wasting money and come up with something completely different instead.

Therefore, watch out for these warning signs to tell if your marketing isn't working the way you presumed it would.

Signs that your marketing strategy is failing

1. There's practically no new customers

Obviously, bringing in new customers with the aim to increase the sales and generate more profit is the reason why marketing plans are developed and campaigns are carried out. Therefore, when no new clients come to your business often your marketing campaign has been running for a while, you need to review the strategy, regroup the resources and change things up.

2. Your marketing campaign fails to generate leads

Your marketing campaign may be still ineffective even if you notice that your business still gains new customers. As a n owner or a head of the marketing department, you need to determine how they came across your business and what made them make a purchase or hire you for a certain project. It's a common thing small and large companies ask their new customers about, as it helps them understand which marketing investments are actually benefiting your business, which aspects of your marketing plan proved to be effective and which aren't worth spending money on.

Furthermore, you get to discover the 'connection line' between your business and its target audience and concentrate your further marketing efforts on it. Whether its social media, contractor referral platforms, influencer marketing or traditional advertising that attracted the attention of most new customers, you need to make the full use of that marketing channel instead of investing your resources into something that fails to generate leads.

3. The sales growth doesn't exceed the average rate

If your marketing works properly, you experience the sales boost that wouldn't happen otherwise. Your average efforts and the word of mouth contribute to the recognition, and, if your operation goes smoothly, your revenue should grow. Slowly, but surely. However, when it comes to a killer marketing campaign, there's to time and place to talk about 'slowly, but surely'. You should experience the sales growth rates reaching type numbers above your business's 'average'. There's no point in investing in it otherwise.

Unfortunately, some businesses manage to attract customers but fail to convince them that their goods and services are worth buying. In that case, it means that the marketing strategy managed to attract customer attention, but the part where it was supposed to trigger the 'purchase action' wasn't strong enough. In other words, your target audience got interested enough to check you out, but it wasn't 'pre-sold'.

4. There's no organic communication

Organic communication is the interaction between your business and your customers, which appears in a form of customer response to your marketing efforts and the services you provide in general. Comments under your social media or blog posts, emails and phone calls with questions, likes and shares, unsolicited online backlinks, etc. When you put out a lot, but it doesn't cause any customer response or at least interest, you should get pretty concerned.

5. There's no unified brand story to tell

Brand recognition is one of the ultimate marketing goals. But, a lot of beginning small businesses fail to develop a strong brand story and tell it on different platforms. When you spread different information in various online resources and traditional marketing platform instead of delivering the same exhaustive message about your services, you won't achieve the desired recognition and your marketing will suffer.

For instance, if you're an owner of a small hair salon that started operating on the market 5 years ago, has been enjoying the loyalty of local, customers even since, has exceptional hairdressers, advanced colorists and provides spa-worthy services at a decent price, you need to repeat that info on various platforms using the same word, sentences, pictures, brand logos, etc. This way you will increase the chances that the repetition will make the potential customer remember your place and consider checking it out the next time he needs to cut his/her hair or get it styled. That's just how the memory works.

Also, you need to make sure that you marketing strategy provides a clear explanation of your services (in case of a hair salon - price lists, visual examples, real hairdressers doing real work, etc). It shouldn't leave customers confused, as if they don't understand the concept if your products/services or why they need them, they'll just throw the ad they saw out of their memory, and that's it.