When your marketing doesn't lead to sales
Tanel Vetik
Head of Strategy
You watch on as your money flows from your bank account to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google, but new money is nowhere to be seen. Your marketing does not lead to sales. Over half of marketing campaigns are run at a loss, and only one in ten campaigns brings back multiple times the profit. That’s the average picture if you take all campaigns into account. It seems hopeless, but actually, we’re looking at it from the wrong angle.
Marketing is just one of the facets of successful sales machines. Depending on the company and the industry, this includes customer service, brand awareness, brand reputation, pricing strategy, and at the top, consumer behavior and the national economic situation. Quite a few aspects are not under the control of the marketer, sales representative, or entrepreneur. Theoretically, this sounds logical, but when you’re in the mud, it’s very easy to instead blame the things we do or don’t do.
When your marketing doesn't lead to sales
Tanel Vetik
Head of Strategy
You watch on as your money flows from your bank account to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google, but new money is nowhere to be seen. Your marketing does not lead to sales. Over half of marketing campaigns are run at a loss, and only one in ten campaigns brings back multiple times the profit. That’s the average picture if you take all campaigns into account. It seems hopeless, but actually, we’re looking at it from the wrong angle.
Marketing is just one of the facets of successful sales machines. Depending on the company and the industry, this includes customer service, brand awareness, brand reputation, pricing strategy, and at the top, consumer behavior and the national economic situation. Quite a few aspects are not under the control of the marketer, sales representative, or entrepreneur. Theoretically, this sounds logical, but when you’re in the mud, it’s very easy to instead blame the things we do or don’t do.
You watch on as your money flows from your bank account to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google, but new money is nowhere to be seen. Your marketing does not lead to sales. Over half of marketing campaigns are run at a loss, and only one in ten campaigns brings back multiple times the profit. That’s the average picture if you take all campaigns into account. It seems hopeless, but actually, we’re looking at it from the wrong angle.
Marketing is just one of the facets of successful sales machines. Depending on the company and the industry, this includes customer service, brand awareness, brand reputation, pricing strategy, and at the top, consumer behavior and the national economic situation. Quite a few aspects are not under the control of the marketer, sales representative, or entrepreneur. Theoretically, this sounds logical, but when you’re in the mud, it’s very easy to instead blame the things we do or don’t do.
The role of marketing
To be honest, there isn’t one specific role. To understand how marketing can best serve your goals, you must first decide whether:
- It’s necessary to test user experience and conversion journeys on your website/physical store.
- Should you direct more traffic to the website because it is already known to convert visitors into customers?
- Is it necessary to test the effectiveness of tools and product-market-fit to be able to capture new markets?
- Are you looking to conduct A/B tests of your customer personas, and see if there have been changes in the market?
- Start marketing because it hasn’t been done before, and now is the right time?
- Is there a plan to update the current digital strategy and sales funnel with new platforms or campaigns?
- Or are you looking to achieve something entirely different?
Most clients reach out to us to get new customers or increase their ecommerce sales. They have a rough budget in mind and have outlied growth targets to be able to say when our collaboration is profitable and when it’s not.
However, we normally don’t start with sales campaigns and advertising. We start in the grassroots level of things and look at their customer profiles, audience insights, look for bottlenecks in their sales funnel, see where we could potentially automate things, etc. Having a strong foundation in place will make marketing and outbound communication much-much more efficient. And more profitable.
If the sales funnel is broken or inefficient, then marketing will also feel broken
If the client’s goal is to get new customers, we first look over:
- The user experience of the website and UX/UI side.
- Conversion journey and data collection (Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Google Search Console, Hotjar, Facebook Pixel, etc.).
- Low-hanging fruits of CRO and bottlenecks in the purchase journey.
In most cases, the first problem is not a lack of traffic, but rather that purchasing the product/service is made too complicated for the customer, or not enough attention has been paid to the value creation side and the level of trust in your product/service does not exceed the price they must pay for it.
Only now does marketing step into the picture and begin its work. For example, if your website sees about 40% of customers drop off in their purchase journey (going from add to cart to successful checkout), which is the national average. Then improving drop-off rates by just 20% will decrease your average cost per purchase by up to 25%.
At a marketing budget of £5,000 per month, this means as much as £15,000 saved per year. That’s a lot of extra budget left over for business growth.
If your website does the job, but marketing does not
In this case, either the marketing strategy is structured incorrectly or your customer profiles are inaccurate. A thorough traffic analysis should already tell you where the bottlenecks are, but you should also take a look at who actually makes purchases and who just browses (PS! Those browsers may have a longer purchase journey and should not be immediately excluded from remarketing campaigns).
During this research, the hypotheses set in your customer personas should be compared with real data one by one, and corrected if necessary. In addition, we need to look at all our digital marketing channels (Google ads, Facebook ads, Instagram ads, LinkedIn ads, YouTube ads, ecommerce marketing campaigns, etc.) and comb through their data in Google Analytics views one by one.
This is made a little easier if you have pulled your marketing data into a Google Looker Studio report, Supermetrics dashboard or any other data analysis tool at some point. It takes a lot of time to work through each platform separately. Those dashboard tools allow you to segment data into a single diagram or graph.
For physical, printed, television, and radio advertisements, it is a bit more complicated, as these data cannot be measured and attributed as effectively as you can with digital channels. Digital channels allow you to use UTM tags to attribute success at an advertisement level.
Success lies in data analysis and having detailed customer personas
It’s very easy to say: „target ads better or adjust your customer profiles“, but having accurate data models in place, and establishing all marketing/sales funnels on tried and tested client profiles is the only surefire way to go if you want to attract new clients through successful marketing campaigns.
If you lack time or in-house expertise
Everything mentioned above does not require a PhD to execute. It takes time, dedication, and consistency. All three of which are hard to dedicate to yet another task as a business owner.
Feel free to contact us. Even though we can’t always help, and don’t work with every business, we do always try to answer questions. If we can’t help, we certainly know someone who can.