Was it a bad joke on live video? A promotion that failed to read the moment accurately? Or is it something more sinister…like a social media campaign that went wildly off track?
Figuring out what killed your marketing mojo can be a challenge. When online orders tank, website traffic goes silent or leads fail to become customers, you can feel like you’re playing a game of Clue.
You’re looking for a killer. You’re trying to identify a weapon. If you can nail down the location, too, you’ll know how to prevent such tragedies in the future.
To detect where your marketing went wrong, you need to be strategic. Don’t just wander around your marketing activities, tweaking or adjusting at random in hopes of uncovering where things went wrong. Wandering around asking a few questions works okay in a board game, but in this live version, you’re going to need a few techniques:
Don’t Take Generic Advice. You could sprinkle in a few more CTAs. Publish a video or two. Run an Instagram contest. A lot of marketing advice out there may tell you to do just these types of things. When you’re marketing is lifeless, you need to approach it with some urgency. Otherwise, it’s like calling the hall monitor to help you solve a murder.
Just as you shouldn’t take generic advice, measure your progress against yourself, not your competitors. There are too many factors involved to know whether a competitor has a good conversion rate or a perfect sales funnel. Simply measure for a benchmark and get set to improve your metrics.
Get Your Spreadsheet Guru Moving. If there’s someone on your team who has a special love for data, this is their moment to shine. A dying marketing strategy needs triage, and a data analytics specialist is a lifesaver.
Tap into Google Analytics. You need to know where your visitors are bouncing, what kinds of CTAs are getting the most clicks and how far down your visitors scroll on any given page. There are also other types of information you should gather:
- Try a heatmap tool. You can choose from move maps, click maps and scroll maps, providing excellent information about where your visitors hang out on a page.
- Get into event tracking. Where do visitors bounce? Is there an event that distracts them from finishing a purchase?
- Test mobile optimization. Even if you’re thinking, “Of course we are mobile optimized!” You may need to address bugs or shortcomings, and there are tests that tell you exactly how your site performs.
Grab Your Cleaning Supplies. Over time, sites get buggy. It’s particularly true of sites that are developed using a template. While custom sites fare better for longer, you may want to do some analysis to see where bugs or crashes frustrate your users. You probably know you can track error messages, but did you know you can also track frustrated clicks? Find out where your visitors are getting angry with your site.
Watch Out for Serial Killers. There are one-time villains to your marketing strategy that you have to smoke out, but there are also perpetrators who strike again and again. As you try to solve the mystery, consider these repeat offenders:
- A few years ago, when you completed your web refresh, you tested your speed and it was great. It doesn’t take much to compromise your speed—a few slow-loading stock images, a bit of badly formatted video and you may find that visitors click away because they don’t have any additional seconds to wait. Test your speed and see if that may be the culprit.
- Form Fills. Times change. Marketing trends certainly do. That means you probably need to take a look at any forms and see if they include ridiculous questions or simply too many. Do you really need to know your visitors’ shoe sizes? Scale back your forms to the style of the moment, which is as short as possible!
- Failing to Get the Easy Ones. Maybe it’s the abandoned cart that needs a quick automated email. Or it might be missing an opportunity to run a promotion for your new product line. Some of the best marketing ideas are the most obvious, so don’t miss out on grabbing that low-hanging fruit.
Take Some Cues. Every killer has a few tricks to get their victims right where they want them. So take a page from their playbook and try tempting your audiences.
After you’ve done good data analysis, you may see some spots where a little bait may be all you need to capture more of the market:
- Free shipping. In a lot of cases, the price point is just high enough that when the potential customer sees the total with shipping, they bail out on the purchase. Consider a short-term free shipping promotion in situations where you notice that people are abandoning carts.
- Trial ownership. This is another one to employ when leads get almost to a purchase but then they back out. They may be easily won over once they try your product or service, but you need to let them do just that before they pay.
- If data analytics shows that people spend a long time contemplating but then end up clicking away, there may be an opportunity to communicate scarcity. For instance, if you can indicate, “This product is in two carts and there are only three in stock,” your guest may go ahead and click the “complete purchase.”
If sleuthing isn’t your thing, or you get a little spooked poking around, you know who to call! SJC Marketing is skilled at identifying what has killed your marketing strategy and how to get it kicking again.