How to Stop Your Marketing From Being Ignored
It can be frustrating for businesses of any size to invest time and money into marketing and see no real return on investment. When it comes to marketing, it’s not just a poor strategy that can limit the return on investment you see. In fact, in the modern marketing world, marketers are becoming increasingly frustrated with unrealistic ROI expectations from senior management, which can be impossible to measure and demonstrate. Although in some instances it can be tricky to directly record ROI from marketing campaigns and activities, it is still possible to demonstrate the effectiveness of your marketing efforts through a number of other metrics. Being able to measure the success of your marketing is important to identify areas that work and also areas that are in need of improvement.
It’s likely that even the most successful organisations have seen campaign results and feedback that are below satisfactory and in need of development. In fact, unfavourable data and failed campaigns are often what lead businesses to greater success in the future. In this article, we will look into why you may not be seeing the marketing results you desire, and more specifically, how to stop your marketing from being ignored.
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Personalisation
Personalisation and customer research go hand in hand. In order to personalise your marketing so that it’s specific to an individual or group of people, you need to understand who your audience is and what factors influence their buying decisions. Personalisation is becoming increasingly important in modern-day marketing techniques as overkill advertising has become easier to spot – and therefore easier to ignore.
Personalisation is important across a number of marketing activities and techniques, social media and website navigation being two of them. In website design and user experience, personalisation helps make a customer’s buying journey smoother and quicker. Many businesses, specifically those in the e-commerce industry, use personalisation when customers return to their site after visiting recently. Typically, returning customers might see a navigation block showing their recently viewed products, encouraging them to add the items to their basket.
In social media marketing, personalisation comes into play in both organic and paid marketing strategies. Personalisation works effectively in retargeting ads, where brands can tailor their ads around items that customers have shown interest in but not yet purchased. Businesses can also create personalised retargeting ads to users who have completely or partially watched a video from a different ad you’ve posted or from your business feed. Personalisation in marketing works because it makes your audience feel valued, encouraging them to trust your business more and ultimately find it easier to decide to purchase.
Simplify Your Strategy
It can be tempting to try every marketing strategy under the sun, especially because there are many of them that can be highly effective when done successfully, but it’s important to focus your budget and efforts on only a few core marketing methods. Simplifying your marketing strategy allows you to be more consistent in each strategy you choose, which often leads to improved results and more accurate data analysis. When you focus your budget and efforts into a few key focus areas, the message you’re communicating to your audience becomes significantly clearer. When your audience understands your purpose and value thoroughly, it’s often easier and quicker for them to make a purchasing decision – the same goes for when they return in the future.
Customer Research
Hopefully, you already have a good idea of what your audience demographic looks like, including what motivates them to make purchasing decisions, as well as their pain points. If you do, it’s still a good idea to refresh your customer insight research regularly, so that you can better understand what information they’re looking for and will respond well to. You can complete customer research in a number of different ways. The most effective methods include customer interviews and surveys that use open-ended questions to gather insights from a large sample of the target audience, and are valued for their accuracy.
Outdated or inaccurate customer research is often the number one reason why your marketing efforts can be ignored, mainly because, over time it’s common for consumer behaviors to change. For example, let’s look at a business selling posters and printed photos, which would typically have a target audience between the ages of 15 and 25 – many of whom will be students. The younger generations buying poster prints today will respond differently to marketing efforts that have always worked for the now older generation. For example, social media has made getting the attention of your audience online harder than ever before, which could mean poster print businesses need to look at social media ads on platforms popular with Generation Z, such as TikTok and Instagram.
It’s not just businesses selling poster prints that need to adapt their marketing strategies based on changing consumer behaviours. Even with a small marketing team and a limited budget, the businesses that see the most success are those that stop marketing to everyone and start marketing to someone who is ready to listen.
