Reasons Your Digital Marketing Strategy May Be Underperforming

Digital marketing and search engine optimization has the potential to send a steady stream of relevant traffic to your website and ultimately generate leads and sales.

Wondering why it’s not and your campaigns are falling short? It’s likely you’re doing something wrong. And you’re probably not the first person to have made that mistake. Here are some reasons why your digital marketing may be falling short:

1. Traffic But No Conversions

One of the most common problems that businesses face is not converting the leads they get on their websites. So if your traffic is increasing but conversions are not, there are several things you should be looking at.

Solutions:

  • Know your audience — If you don’t know what your potential customer wants, how do you expect your campaigns to be successful? Make the effort to try and understand who your audience is.
  • Improve your copy — Copy includes your blog articles, marketing copy across all platforms, landing pages, emails, and more. If these are inconsistent in tone, written poorly and don’t connect with your audience, then you won’t get the response you want.
  • Make your messaging consistent — If your service or business is not clearly defined and explained, it will only end up confusing your leads. Without a clear message across all your marketing channels and campaigns, it will appear disjointed and turn leads away from your site.

2. Looking at the Wrong Metrics For Digital Marketing

KPIs will help you figure out if your campaigns are working, but if you’re tracking the wrong metrics, then you’ll keep wasting money on areas that don’t improve your conversions.

For example, some site owners want more buyers from their email campaigns. They would want to track clickthrough rates and resulting sales. However, they might forget to look at other valuable metrics: the trend of open rates over time, and CTRs of landing pages and opt-in pages.

Solutions:

  • Switch your focus from keyword rankings to conversions and goals — Track more valuable conversions like telephone calls, email link clicks, form completions, downloads. Measuring these will tell you the top-performing channels, which means you can spend more of your budget on them.
  • Look at qualitative data — Numbers don’t lie, but it also pays to look at qualitative data. Interview your customers or conduct surveys so you can look at factors like customer satisfaction. Anecdotal data can often reveal exactly where you’re going wrong in a way that numbers can’t.

3. Running Campaigns on The Wrong Channel

If you don’t invest time in conducting in-depth consumer research, whatever clever marketing that you post on social media or online ads will not work.

Solution:

  • Understand your audience — There’s no getting away from it: do your customer research. However well you think you know what your customer base looks like, chances are you don’t fully understand them. You need to ask questions like who they are, where do they spend time online, do they respond to ads, or do they prefer to establish trust first via content? Once you’ve built a strong set of customer personas, you’ll have a better idea of which platforms you should be investing in.

4. SEO Competition

SEO can get technical and daunting, especially if you’re in a highly competitive space. If you’re finding it hard to rank, there are several things that might help.

Solutions:

  • Differentiate yourself — Check out your competitors and see what they are doing. Then, try a different strategy or fill in a gap that isn’t currently being satisfied. For instance, you can add videos on top of articles to also rank on YouTube. You can also write about topics that your competitors haven’t written about yet.
  • Stay updated — Algorithms change frequently, and you have to make sure you’re informed. Make sure you keep an eye on new updates and what the SEO industry is saying so you can adapt and adjust your strategy accordingly.
  • Optimize your site properly — The real reason you might not be ranking above your competition is that your site is poorly optimized. You might want to think about conducting an SEO audit to see what you need to improve. Working with a trusted SEO agency (like us) allows you to bypass this steep learning curve and take this off your plate.

If you’re feeling truly frustrated, reach out to us and we can help you get your ad campaigns back on track!