Every year, you look forward to July for weeks, maybe even since last July. You’ve saved up, planned carefully and mapped out a month full of celebrations. After all, it’s the nation’s 250th year, and you want to make the most of it.
You host cookouts, family gatherings and neighborhood get-togethers. There’s barbecue and potato salad, Jell-O poke cake and homemade ice cream. Lawn chairs fill the backyard, bug spray is passed around and kids run through the grass with sparklers in hand.
The month unfolds just as you imagined. There are fireworks displays, parades, community events and long summer evenings spent with friends and family. Roman candles, spinners, whistlers and comets light up the sky. The memories pile up one after another, building toward what feels like the perfect July.
Then, as the month comes to a close, the finale falls flat.
The last fireworks show is underwhelming. The fountains are smaller than expected, the aerials lack punch and the timing feels off. Your guests aren’t even sure it’s over. In the awkward silence, you hear a young kid ask his mom, “Is that it?”
After weeks of anticipation and celebration, July ends not with a bang, but with a fizzle.
The Fizzled Flop
Your marketing strategy may not have much in common with a fireworks display, but it can fizzle all the same.
If you’re not getting the results you anticipated, you may be wondering what went wrong. And if you’re like a lot of companies, it’s probably one or two of just a few common mistakes:
The Fizzle: Messy Targeting
A strategy may be well-crafted, only to fall flat when it’s time to execute. The reason? Imprecise targeting.
Whether you’re trying to write content for too broad an audience or you are ill-informed about your potential customers’ pain points, messy targeting is a common mistake made by marketing teams.
The result is that the people most likely to buy your product or service are not the ones seeing your campaign.
The Fix: Learn everything you can about your target market, from age range to gender to hobbies. Find out which social media platform they prefer and during which hours they tend to hang out there.
You should also try to learn what ails your audience. In other words, what are the pain points that might make them seek out your solution? Do they need to solve a problem, or is there a way your product makes their lives better? Get familiar with their complaints.
Finally, create a few buyer personas. These are profiles of your ideal customers that highlight their preferences, their demographics and the reasons why they might purchase from your company. Then, market to them.
The Fizzle: Low SEO Investment
You’re not findable. Your potential customers go to search for a product that you sell and every competitor and even every loosely related company comes up in the search results before your site.
This is no accident. You’ve never completely understood SEO, so you did what a lot of companies do. You ignored it and hoped it would go away.
The Fix: Spend a little time getting to know SEO. From keyword strategies to meta descriptions and transcripts, there are a lot of steps you can take to improve your rankings on a search engine results page (SERP).
SEO is not all-or-nothing; you can begin implementing best practices one at a time while regularly creating new content that also boosts your ranking. As you work to align your site with search engine algorithms, you’ll begin to see improvement over time, and you’ll see organic traffic to your site grow, too.
The Fizzle: Inconsistent Marketing
You write a blog now and then. You post on social media when you see something informative (or funny) that you want to share. Or, when you get busy, you may tell your assistant to post something for a holiday.
You have heard that video marketing is dominant on social media, but you haven’t done anything after you made one how-to video. It didn’t yield much engagement, so why would you bother with it again?
Or…scratch that. Maybe you post once or twice every week, produce a blog twice a month and have made quite a few videos. But you notice that people click away before they get to the end of your blogs and videos.
The Fix: Consistently posting on social media and creating content are part of a good marketing strategy, but many brands get it wrong. If you tend to be inconsistent or go off-topic either in your social posts or on a video, you may benefit from a more structured approach.
Content and social marketing calendars equip you to prioritize your marketing activities and engage with them in a more mindful, strategic way. You won’t be posting because you thought of something or because it’s Tuesday. You’re posting because your marketing team decided it would be advantageous to highlight your upcoming campaign in a series of coordinated social posts.
The Fizzle: Neglecting Data
Are you frustrated that you can’t obtain an ROI or know whether a particular mailer did anything to help your new product line?
Maybe you wish you could know more about the visitors to your website and which pages they like.
These are all examples of data that is readily available to marketing teams, though many don’t utilize it.
The Fix: From Google Analytics to social media demographics and even printing a QR code on your mailer, there’s so much you can do to quantify your marketing.
Collecting and analyzing data on your audience, web traffic and social media engagement provide valuable insights for your marketing strategy. It allows you to refine and adjust to make your strategy better and more effective.
The Ultimate Fix
There’s no reason for your marketing strategy to bomb, fizzle or flop. When you work with SJC Marketing, you gain access to a full team of strategists, web designers, writers, videographers, social media experts and more. Like a great fireworks show, we are perfectly coordinated to launch your company into a new era of growth, helping you shine and make the most of your marketing investment. Contact us today to get started!