How business has changed over the last 20 or so years. Gone are the days of walking from one shop to another to buy your things. As a consumer you have the option, nowadays, to buy almost anything you want without leaving home. And the choices are increasing all the time.
If you’re a seller, this is not good news. Online business is very competitive. With so many options, customers are becoming more demanding. It’s getting harder to attract customers and harder still to keep them. We all know that we need leads to keep our businesses alive. And we run campaigns to generate leads.
But no campaign is a guaranteed success. We don’t always get as many leads as we want or expect. Why? What are we doing wrong? We’re spending money on campaigns and the customers aren’t coming. Well, let’s look at a few common mistakes and what we should do to avoid them.
Advertising homeowners’ insurance to people below 25 years of age will probably not result in many new policies being sold. Just as advertising skateboarding equipment to over 30s will not boost sales very much. While there will be some potential customers in both campaigns, they will be a very small number in a large audience. The Return on Investment for both of these campaigns will be low and uneconomical.
It’s a good idea to assess and categorize profiles of customers or contacts. In this way, advertising and marketing communications can be directed to audiences that have shown an interest in the specific product or service or something similar. The number of leads generated by targeted communications should be much higher and the money spent will yield a better return.
Return on Investment (ROI) is a key measurement for how wisely you are spending your money. A good ROI shows that advertising or content is directly converting into inquiries. Possibly even sales. ROI goes hand-in-hand with audience selection. If your ROI is low, you should have another look at how you selected your target audience.
Measuring ROI is not very difficult. There are various measurements you can use. The most common one is the revenue generated by a campaign. A positive percentage of revenue compared to cost is good. The higher, the better, of course. You can also measure responses compared to page visits to see how much impact your message is making. A low response rate might mean your message is not powerful enough.
Have you ever gone into a shop and stood around waiting for someone to help you? What happened? Well, after a few minutes you walked out, didn’t you? The same will happen if you don’t react to an inquiry from a new lead. He’s already in your shop waiting for you to attend to him. If you don’t serve him quickly enough, he’ll just walk out again. And, he’s probably never coming back.
You need to keep track of all your leads and have a system to engage with them. Some of these processes can be automated. At the very least, you need to respond as soon as possible to every inquiry. You also need to set up a reminder system to ensure that you can follow up regularly.
A Call to Action (CTA) is a vital component in any advertisement or marketing message. Without a CTA, a reader probably won’t know what to do next. He may be interested in knowing more, but you have not told him how to ask. So, he moves on and looks somewhere else.
A CTA is usually a button or a link that invites a reader to “Click here for more information” or something similar. Every effort you make to attract a customer, must have a CTA. Without a CTA, very few people will follow through on your message.
When a visitor reacts to any message you have sent or to content on your website, they are usually directed to another page. This place where the visitor lands, is called the landing page. If a landing page is boring, the visitor will probably not be excited to buy your product or to find out more.
You should tailor landing pages carefully to highlight your product or service. If you have more than one product or service, you should seriously consider having separate landing pages for each. Particularly if each product or service is quite different. At the very least, you should have landing pages tailored to each individual campaign.
There are many other mistakes that can be made. There are also a lot of other strategies or techniques that you can follow to maximize the value of your marketing efforts. We have highlighted what we consider to be the five most common pitfalls. They’re also relatively easy to fix and have the biggest impact when done correctly.
Ali is our digital marketing wizard, having a bachelor’s in marketing and a minor in psychology gives him a spectactular appraoch to digital marketing.In the office, he’s always snacking on something and listening to music while writing. His favorite quote is “Manifest destiny”
