When it comes to digital marketing, people talk a good game about “brand building” and “connecting with customers” — and those are undoubtedly important — but the most important reason your business spends its precious budget on marketing is to generate leads, to make the phones ring, to bring in new clients and customers. You spend money to make money.
And if your digital marketing isn’t generating ad clicks and driving visitors to your website and prospects to your door, then it’s not doing its job and you are wasting your money.
Here are five reasons why your marketing might not be working for your local business
1. Your digital marketing just isn’t goal-oriented. The average small business owner has a website because they know, on some level, that they have to have a website. But odds are, the site is little more than a digital placeholder — strictly a “brochure site,” as they used to say. It isn’t written and designed to maximize engagement, generate leads, and help with conversion. So, even if they get visitors to their site, they’re not doing what they need to do to convert visitors into customers.
Of course, today, a business, regardless of size, needs more than just a website. You need a Facebook Business Page, search ads, maybe social ads – and you’ve got to have customer reviews everywhere. And all of it needs to generate leads – qualified, actual, could-really-become-customers leads.
But that’s not happening.
Here’s an example… according to one recent study, the most popular online advertising for small businesses is social media. That’s great — as I said, social is an integral part of today’s digital marketing mix. But, unfortunately, the posts and ads you see on social are usually brand-building rather than response-generating. Boosted posts on Facebook are often posts the business owner likes rather than a post designed to generate qualified leads. Many don’t even include links or a simple CTA. They’re not driving traffic to your site (or Blog or landing page), so they’re not working to achieve your goal of growing your business. That’s not going to grow your business.
2. You’re assuming your website can do all the heavy lifting. There’s a rampant misconception that someone looking for your business will magically land on your website. Of course, when you think about it, everyone knows today’s customer journey usually starts with a search engine — whether it’s Google, Yahoo, Bing, or even YouTube (considered by many to be one of the most significant search engines). And beyond simple search results, the journey can include stops on social pages like Facebook or Instagram, review pages like Yelp, or any of a dozen listings that might mention your business.
Of course, more and more today, searchers don’t get past the information they find at the top of Google’s search results – your Google Business Profile. Depending on the information you provide, it can just be your name and address, or it can also include your phone number, hours, website URL, and even ratings and reviews. So you need to make sure that your Google Business Profile information is up to date, that it’s presenting your business the way you want to be represented (the correct specialties, etc.), that simple things like your hours are correct – and it has to be working as hard as possible to convince shoppers to choose you, or at the very least, click through to your site.
The bottom line is that your digital marketing strategy must include every step of the customer journey — search, social, listings, website and more. Your website alone can’t carry the entire weight of your online advertising and marketing.
Every few months, at the very least, take the time to review your digital marketing to see what’s working and what needs to be adjusted. Anything that’s not driving visitors to your website or calls to your business should be modified or dropped.
3. You’re not keeping up with the times. It’s harder than ever to keep up to date with today’s digital technology -- from keeping up with every change Google makes to keep your business as high as possible in the search results, to understanding Facebook’s targeting matrix, to trying to be aware of new social media platforms (is your audience on TikTok?). Not to mention, today, typed-out search is just part of the equation. Google, Yahoo, and Bing are being pushed aside increasingly by voice search — Siri, Alexa, or Google.
Ensuring your website is built to enable voice search (with “schema mark-up”) is just the start. It’s making sure your site is secure, it’s automatically sharing customer reviews on your site, on Facebook, and in your listings, and it’s delivering the same messaging as all the other marketing you’re doing online and off. And that leads us to…
4. Your website isn’t being social with your social, your ads, and your online listings. Ok, maybe I’m getting too cute here, but what I mean is that your website, your social media, and your listings information have to talk to each other — and they have to agree. They have to match. Your online information has to speak with a single, consistent voice, or customers and prospects will lose confidence in anything they read about you online — even something as basic as your hours of operation.
If a prospect clicks on a search result and gets taken to a website with entirely different messaging, they’ll turn around in about two seconds. The same goes for ads you run — even if they lead to a specific landing page -- what happens if they don’t fill out the form on your LP but instead search for you later and visit your website? If there’s a disconnect between all those pieces, you probably won’t complete a sale. Today’s digital customer journey is a long and varied trip, and it’s easy for sales to get lost if the steps don’t seem to lead to the same destination.
5. You’re not sharing all the nice things people are saying about you. Studies have shown that customer reviews are a key (if not the #1) reason prospects choose a business. Online reviews have replaced the traditional word of mouth that used to drive business. Today, someone looking for a product or service starts and ends by looking at how many stars a business is getting. They’re taking the time to read reviews, to see what other customers are saying about you. You must do the work to generate and share positive reviews. Without them, you’re likely to get skipped over online.
So, why isn’t YOUR digital marketing working?
There are a lot of reasons why your digital marketing may not be working — misplaced targeting, for example, not really knowing your audience –but that could be an entire article on its own. The five reasons above are fundamental, relatively easy to understand, easy to uncover, and relatively easy to fix… or at least start to fix.
You pay a lot of money for your digital marketing. Take the time to do it right, or give that money to a partner who will do it for you to generate the leads you need.