A lot of business of owners “hate” marketing, but if you want customers/clients it’s pretty much required. While marketing isn’t exactly rocket science, it’s more than just pretty pictures and strategically placed fonts – it’s how you communicate your value and build relationships with potential buyers. There’s not a single “right” way to go about your marketing, but there are a few things you should definitely avoid!

5 REASONS YOUR MARKETING ISN’T WORKING

1) You don’t have a target audience

Marketing to “anyone with money” is not a good strategy, honestly, it’s not a strategy at all. Having a target audience will help you when it comes to your branding, your marketing strategy, your copy, and the products/services you offer. If you’re trying to appeal to everyone, you’re probably appealing to no one – so the more specific you can be in terms of who your product/service is for, the better!

Marketing without a target audience is really just putting stuff out into the world and hoping someone will buy it. I’m pretty sure that NO ONE would agree that’s the best marketing strategy – or is that even a strategy at all???

2) You don’t have a strategic plan

You can spend hours and hours on “marketing” but if you don’t have a strategic plan, you could be wasting a ton of precious time! You can’t just post whatever you feel like on social media or spend hours taking pretty flat lays or writing blog posts or creating free downloads without a goal in mind. Your marketing actions should always have a purpose, and you should be leading your customers down an intentional path.

I find it easier to work backward from your end goal (whatever you are selling) and reverse engineer your content paths. Mapping out a strategic plan will not only help you figure out what content you need to create and share, but it will also keep you on track to actually accomplish your goals.

3) You plan but don’t take action

What’s worse than not having a strategic plan? Actually taking time to make a plan and then not taking action. You can research and strategize and plan for months, but if you don’t take action – you fail before you even get started. It’s easy to get caught up in doing everything “just right”  – but in reality, there’s no such thing as a perfect plan.

4) You aren’t consistent

For 99.9999% of people, success doesn’t happen overnight. If you’re not showing up consistently to connect with your audience, to build brand awareness, and to promote your products/services – then you’re doing yourself and your business a disservice. Consistency breeds credibility. Marketing isn’t something that you can do for a hot minute until you get busy and forget about it. Only a fraction of your audience is seeing your social media posts or reading your blog posts or opening your emails – so if you’re not being consistent, you’re not maximizing your reach.

5) You aren’t paying attention to your analytics

The only way to really know if your marketing is “working” is to track your results. Use the available tools to track your marketing activities – each social media platform or scheduler hasitss own analytics, you should set up google analytics for your website / blog, and your email marketing service probably has it’s own built in analytics as well. 

And for your analytics to be relevant, you need to establish specific goals – so for example, if one of your goals is to use Pinterest to drive more traffic to your website, then you should be tracking your referral traffic from your website to establish which traffic is drawing the most to your website so you can do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.