7 Signs that something’s going wrong with your marketing strategy

We live in a world of ambitious targets, resourceful and selective clientele and of course, a cost of living crisis. With this in mind, it’s important to be able to identify when your brand and its strategy has stopped performing and to pivot accordingly.

We’ve highlighted 7 common indicators of a troubled brand:

1. You’ve seen a dip in new customers

There have been a lot of changing circumstances over the last few years from the pandemic to costs of living and a shift towards environmentally conscious brands. As such, the values of our customers are changing and chances are, what was a good enough reason to buy from you in the past is no longer considered as important to your audience anymore.

2. Customers aren’t as loyal as they once were

Building up a fan base of repeat customers is vital to the success of any business. So what’s stopping people from coming back to you like they did before? It sounds like there may have been a shift in values - it might be that you’re no longer seen as the credible authority in the market anymore, perhaps customers have found a cheaper or easier alternative. Something has changed and by the sounds of it.

3. You’re slipping down in the ranks on Google

You’ve run a few test searches for your most important keywords and you’re not appearing in the top few listings anymore, in fact you’ve dropped to the second page. What’s happening? It could be that there’s a problem with your website but it’s more likely that Google believes your content is out of date or less useful/relevant than your competitors.

4. You’re struggling to make sense of the stats

You’ve got a really high bounce rate but people are staying on your site for longer than ever. Since the switch to GA4 you’re only getting half the picture and are finding that you’re making wild generalisations based on the few remaining stats you have available. Are you sure you’re looking in the right places? What really matters to your business? What are the most important touchpoints, landing pages and call-to-actions? Are there other analytics packages that offer the bigger picture?

5. Your open rates are lower than ever

Despite your best efforts, your email campaigns are falling flat. Open rates are low and click-throughs are lower still. Are you sure you’re sharing the right sort of content through this touchpoint? Are you sending emails too regularly? Are you giving people a good enough reason to open the message?

6. You’re getting plenty of leads but no conversions

People are coming through the door or picking up the phone but your sales figures aren’t heading in the right direction. Sounds like either you’re attracting the wrong audience, your sales approach isn’t answering the right questions or you might have priced yourself out of the equation. Time to review what your audience really wants and consider how you can get them from one end of your sales funnel to the other.

7. You’re only talking about yourself

Take a quick look back through your social media account. What are you talking about? Is it useful to your audience or are you just boasting about how great you are - nobody likes that guy. Remember, you’re not the hero - you’re the guide.

So what’s the solution?

Well there’s a few actually. The secret to a great marketing strategy is first understanding your marketplace so we’d recommend that you perform the following tasks:

Create a Customer Journey Map

By performing a series of workshops you can discover the goals, tasks, questions, influences and touchpoints of your audience. At each touchpoint and stages in the customer’s journey you’ll be able to identify exactly what matters to them most, why and when/how would be best to reach them. Ideally you should be doing this every year or two to ensure that you're reacting to any changes in behaviour.

Competitive Analysis

Gaining a thorough understanding of what your competitors are up to is a great way to establish a benchmark for your marketing. You can use and adapt their best ideas to suit your brand and you can excel where they’re currently failing.

Next up it’s important to get your affairs in order. Before we start blowing the budget on PPC ad campaigns we need to make sure that your website is performing as it should and that we’re targeting the right keywords:

Keyword research

Using your customer journey map as a guide, you should look into what people are searching for and assess how competitive each word or phrase might be.

Website performance review

A slow, un-optimised website will lead to a poor user experience and lower rankings as a result. You should conduct a thorough technical performance review of the site to make sure that everything’s up to date and as fine-tuned as possible before splashing the cash on a digital campaign.

Review your KPIs

Before diving into a campaign we need to define what success looks like. What key performance indicators (KPIs) are there that will suggest that your campaign was a success - how can you track and measure them?

Setting up analytics

With your KPIs defined, you need to track the data. Set up any ‘events’ that are important to the campaign before you launch. Also consider whether you can move to (or run in tandem) an alternative analytics provider to Google (we recommend Fathom). There are a number of GDPR compliant alternatives to Google Analytics out there that will offer you a much fuller picture.

Finally, it’s time to implement your marketing plan. What can you do to plan for success?

Content review

Based on the valuable research you performed earlier you should audit and review the content of your website, literature and other marketing materials to ensure they’re aligning with the needs and values of your audience.

Content marketing strategy

Stop talking about yourself and start guiding your audience. Create a detailed content marketing strategy for the coming months to ensure that you stick to the plan and don’t revert back to old habits.

Regular reports and reviews

Don’t rest on your laurels - regular reports to review progress are vital to record successes and also highlight any issues early on.

Next steps

If you’d like to discuss your own marketing strategy then please get in touch and we’d be more than happy to set up a chat soon to discuss what we can do to help.