Marketing Not Working? Here’s How to get Better ROI

 

“As an inventor, Edison made 1,000 unsuccessful attempts at inventing the light bulb. When a reporter asked, “How did it feel to fail 1,000 times?” Edison replied, “I didn’t fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps.“

We live in an age when only 24% of businesses see positive ROI from marketing efforts. Rightly, business owners want their hard-earned marketing budget to bring returns for their business. Most marketers with integrity want the same thing as successful campaigns bring loyal clients.

Focussing on returns makes sense. However, some entrepreneurs get disappointed when they don’t get immediate tangible returns from their marketing campaign. Their first reaction is to stop their marketing campaign, in the mistaken belief that ‘it is not working’. Turning your back on marketing is akin to throwing the baby out with the bath water – a costly overreaction in most cases. The reality is that effective marketing is a process with several components to get right before you get maximum results. In this post, I will highlight the four components of marketing and how you can implement changes to get the return on your marketing investment.

I will focus on three enormous challenges for businesses to come to terms with in their marketing campaigns: measuring results; choosing the right marketing method, and understanding the marketing process. The article concludes with suggestions to bring it all together and ‘Fail better’ on the road to marketing results

 

Measuring marketing results

Successful marketing generates business in a profitable way. That’s what marketing is trying to accomplish. However, there are several challenges to evaluating the success of marketing campaigns, although most small business tends to focus on Return On Investment (ROI). ROI is calculated using two primary metrics: the cost to do something, and the outcomes generated as a result (typically measured in revenue).

Calculating ROI for marketing can be tricky, depending on how you measure impact and costs. Large corporates have complex formulas and algorithms, which factor dozens of different variables. Secondly, calculating ROI manually for each marketing campaign takes time and access to company financials, which few have access to or bring into the evaluation. Thirdly, many businesses fall into an attribution error in which they mistakenly blame a marketing campaign for not achieving their unrealistic results; For example, it is nonsensical to blame a PPC campaign that generated traffic to a destination for the fact that the visitors did not convert into customers when they got there. The problem is more likely to be with the destination in this case. Lastly, an evaluation by revenue approach requires patience. However, it could be months before having sufficient information to know if a campaign was profitable. We will come back to this point in the following sections, as it is the recurring theme when it comes to achieving marketing results.

The marketing methods challenge

Businesses have a vast range of marketing options from which to choose today. Should you focus on digital marketing strategies or traditional (offline) methods? Within each approach, there are more decisions to make. For example, organic social media marketing, pay per click ads or content development? You can further subdivide these overarching marketing methods into techniques such as Facebook vs LinkedIn; organic social media vs paid ads.

The menu of options makes it challenging to identify the right marketing strategy for any marketing initiative. There is an argument that with so much choice, businesses are more prone to make incorrect decisions about their marketing.

The marketing method you choose will impact the timescale in which you can realistically expect to get returns on your marketing spends. For example, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) tends to be a long-term strategy where it may take many months to rise up the search rankings and see a noticeable drive in traffic to your business. On the other hand, one would expect faster returns from advertising on search, video or social media, especially if the campaign is a PPC approach to drive traffic to a website or other buying destination.

The decisions you make in your planning helps to choose the right marketing strategy and the returns you could achieve. Whereas, regardless of which method you choose, understanding and working with the marketing process will dramatically increase your chances of getting the returns you want.

Components of marketing

A good grasp of the parts of effective marketing campaigns is the foundation for analysing what is not working in a marketing campaign – this approach is more beneficial than ditching a marketing initiative altogether. This knowledge beckons you to adopt an experimental testing approach and making changes to the critical parts of your campaign that gets you nearer to securing the returns for your money.

Every marketing campaign can be broken down into four parts:

1. Targeting – this is often an essential part of any campaign planning because you want to be promoting your products and services to the right people who will be more likely to buy. Many businesses either wrongly assume that ‘everyone’ is their target or they focus on the wrong people. When you do that, you end up talking to no one. When you can identify your potential clients’ needs along with the trigger point that motivates them to seek your help, the next step in your marketing strategy becomes more straightforward to implement. All you have to do is show up in the places where they look for you, address the trigger point and deliver the solution in a format in which they will best consume it.
2. Message – understanding your target audience enables you to speak their language; to tell them how and why your offering solves their problem in ways that they will engage. As you can see, the message follows seamlessly from understanding your target audience. Marketing expert Al Lautenslager outlines eight ways you can engage your customers, create brand believers and gain fans for everything you sell
3. Offer – Successful marketing seeks to encourage the audience to act now because it people put off the buying decision they may never come back – they could well have seen a better offer form a competitor or do not feel that your incentive was enticing enough for them to act. Pamela Vaughan rightly tells us that offers are the gateways to lead generation. Without them, site visitors have no way of getting converted into leads. They are also a critical tool for nurturing existing leads to a position that makes them more sales-ready.
4. Hook – you want your marketing campaign to grab people’s attention; to stop them in their tracks so that they take a look at your ad, post or article. The Hook should be an enticing inducement to your audience. A creative hook is an emotional trigger in your advertising that attracts buyers; it appeals to their self-image and affirms that you provide what they’re seeking.

Understanding these four components of your marketing campaign hold the key to unlocking the return on investment for any business. Adjusting any or all of these parts of your drive methodically to achieve better marketing outcomes is the best strategy that successful companies use. So instead of ditching your marketing, it is best to establish which part is not working and needs improving.

There is no hiding the reality that time is money. So effective marketers need the time and budget to carry out their ‘tests’ to find the right combination of the components for your campaign. Invariably, those who get results have patience and belief in the process. As a marketing agency, we are focused on learning from day one and working towards achieving the client’s goals. Furthermore, we only recommend ending a marketing campaign to a client, when we have tried as many as the combinations as our client can stomach.

 

Bringing it all together

The time and process of working towards establishing optimised components for your marketing successful marketing bring enormous benefits in its own right as Edison makes clear in the opening quote because knowing what does not work so that you stop doing it is often as useful as working out what is effective. When businesses end their marketing abruptly, they typically miss out on the incremental learning and progress that you have made in the campaign. It is much better to wash the baby than to flush it out with the dirty bathwater!

 

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