What to do when your marketing isn’t working for you

Marketing is something you can experiment a lot with, and it’s something you can take in a lot of different directions depending on your business type and personal preferences. But when it comes down to it, you need to have a strong marketing mind on your shoulders, and you need to have a strong campaign on your side to bring the customers to you and to make the profit margins outweigh the costs side.

So now’s the time to think about why your marketing isn’t working for you, and how you can make a difference in it. After all, you’ve got a lot of years ahead of you in your business, and you’re going to want a good foundation to work off of. 

Your marketing methods alone are going to lay the way for you, seeing as the adverts and promotions you put out there are the face of your business until the customers come to you. If it isn’t working you need to find out how to improve your marketing using tools to work out what you need to do. 

Determine what you need to achieve

Marketing is something every business tries to do differently, considering you have different wants and needs compared to your competitors. You’re at different stages in your company life, and you’ve had different results with your previous methods so far, and these are all factors you need to take into account. After all, how else will you be able to determine what your business needs to achieve in the marketing department?

So, first of all, take a look back at what you’ve managed, in terms of outreach, profits, the costs compared to them, and the leads you’ve developed as a result. This is because you need to know what marketing methods haven’t worked for you, and try to avoid the specifics of them for your next attempt at putting your business out there. Of course you can try to rework them, but you need to determine where they went wrong, and that’s the next step. Why did your previous marketing efforts fail? How did the results they brought in compare to the ones you’d predicted or wished for when you invested? What was the reaction of the focus groups you held, or the investors you ran your thoughts and plans by?

Beyond this, it’s all research. You’ve got to be sure you’ve got the right information, and enough of the right information, on your side. It’s the only way you’re going to analyse the market in front of you effectively; there’s quite a few questions you need to get some backup for:

• What kind of market are you working in, and what’s its true size?
• Have there been any significant developments within this market over the past 18 months at least?
• What kind of people shop within this market? What do they look like? What are their habits?
• What businesses are you going to be working with? Or against? How stacked up is the competition against you?
• What kind of sales do these competitors run? What customers do they attract? How do you differ? How can you use that difference to run better success?

There can be quite a few more questions for you to explore here, but make sure you use ones like these as your basis for running some good research.

Decide the kind of customers you want to attract

If you want to market your business effectively, you need to know what your customers are. You need to know what they do, how they shop, what they like to get out of the shopping experience, and most importantly, whether they already have a business like yours in their life. And you want to try and fit your business neatly into all of these considerations, to try and be the best fit in a market that has quite a few people for you to serve. But all in all, if you’re constantly trying to take yourself to a customer, you’ll have no natural attraction to bring them towards you.

A lot of the time, companies like take their business towards their customers, and for quite a few years it’s been that way. You want to have reminders of your company’s existence right on a customer’s doorstep, or being shown on their TV, or pushed through their letterbox. But you have the internet at your disposal these days as well, and you can find customers right on their home turf, and draw them towards you with an inbound marketing strategy. Think about it: if you know the kinds of customers you want shopping with you and promoting you, then you’re going to be a lot more creative and cool with your marketing methods.

You can use SEO to your advantage, with plenty of videos and social media posts and blog articles to keep people going out in search of what you offer. After all, if you’ve got good content for people to look for in their own time, you’re far less likely to push them away with an advert they can’t skip in front of their favorite Youtube video, or on their TV interrupting the program they’ve been waiting all day to watch. You don’t want to be intrusive, especially if your intrusive methods haven’t worked one bit before now.

How is your marketing working out for you?

Marketing your business takes a lot of time and effort, and you don’t want to jump into an advertising campaign without knowing what you’re doing, what isn’t currently working or where you’re taking your business. You want a direction to go in, a clear goal to reach by the end, and all the results you had planned out taking shape along the way. And when you’re directionless with little to no research on your side, all you’re going to make are mistakes.

So now’s your chance to look back at where your company came from, with all the marketing mistakes you’ve made along the way. After all, there’s a lot of marketing opportunities out there for you to look into, and paying attention to history is the only way to stop it repeating!