Why Does My Marketing Fail?

Do you ever feel like you can’t show the value of your marketing or that all your efforts in marketing fail?

You may feel like you put in all of this work but it isn’t translating into results or you feel like it is having an effect but you just can’t prove it.

In small business, this is often the snowball result of a poorly defined business strategy that leads to a poorly aligned marketing strategy that leads to hodgepodge efforts to move the needle that leads to confusion and corner-cutting to try to get it all done. Whew.

So how do you fix it?

Define Your Business Goals and Be Realistic

As a business leader, you set the tone of the organization. If your goals bounce from idea to idea and your focus shifts on a monthly basis then all of your departments will follow suit. Marketing is a long-term game to facilitate your sales team. To facilitate, you need to observe what works and what doesn’t. If you change too many things at once, you don’t allow the process to be analyzed and refined. This is what leads your teams to say that they think it is working but can’t prove it. There are just too many variables.

If you can clearly define your business goals for the year and stick with them consistently, then you are empowering your teams to perfect your marketing and sales processes and create a system they can iterate and grow your business with.

When defining your goals, use the SMART method. You cannot be everything to everyone. In fact you want to be only what your minimum viable audience needs you to be.

Ensure Your Marketing Strategy Aligns With Your Business Goals

If you are clearly defining your business strategy, then you should expect your marketing strategy to be clearly defined as well. If you gave the end goal, expect your team to tell you:

• Who your ideal buyer is
• What their journey looks like
• How we plan to engage with them at every stage
• How we will empower sales to provide for them at every stage

Answering these questions, will allow your marketing team to provide a strategy for content, social media, email, automation and more.

Don’t Cut Corners

You’ve seen the strategy. You got excited. Now, you must be patient and let your team do great work. Allow your team the time to properly align their work to the right campaigns and reporting features. By doing so, you are permitting them to show their value and also showing opportunities to improve so that your marketing efforts don’t feel like you are throwing darts blindfolded. Allow them time for analysis and optimization. It is easy to push for more and more and more but there will be a point that more does not equal better. You may have more blog and social media posts but if you rush to get out the content without thinking about the reporting then you will never know if it helped your buyers or not.

When In Doubt Ask Yourself What Would Your Buyer Want

All marketing is to facilitate sales and sales is to support your buyers and hopefully align their problems to the solution your organization offers. So they next time you have an idea of what you think your marketing team should do, ask yourself does this help my buyer? If you can’t say yes then is that really what you should be doing? Constantly keeping your eye on what is important will help your business and your marketing stay on track.