One of the hardest things about marketing is knowing what to do next. It’s especially hard if you’ve got a good thing going on. Unfortunately, most don’t even know if that good thing really is good! 

It normally happens like this: you don’t know what’s working, but the business is doing decently well. Maybe you are active on social media, but don’t know if it’s turning people into customers. You published an ebook, but you don’t know if the people who download it are engaging with you further. You send emails, but your email open rates aren’t hitting industry standards. You sent direct mail, but people didn’t mention it when they bought your product. 

It’s in times like this that it’s easy to be antsy. Most of the time, you are missing the data – or don’t know what data is most important. 

You start to wonder if things will just start to dry up. You have things in the pipeline, but it’s never easy to predict if that will change. 

Here’s our caution in times like this. Don’t stop a marketing channel unless you know that it isn’t working. 

Yes, this is hard to prove. Customers don’t always tell you exactly what happened along their journey that caused them to buy. But in some cases, it can be proven that something isn’t working (and of course, those things are worth stopping). We’d just recommend that you get someone to look into it before you put these efforts on the chopping block. 

But you might know things aren’t working all that well if some of these data points are performing poorly – all related to your website… Are your site visitors low? Is your bounce rate high? Is your time on page low? Is your load time high? Are your key site conversions low? 

If these answers are yes – or these terms are unfamiliar to you –  you likely need help to get consistent business in the door. 

But that doesn’t mean you need to stop doing things – it might mean that you need to do more of what you are already doing. And it might mean that you just need to tweak how you are doing what you are doing. 

Here are some examples of what we mean by doing more of or tweaking what you are already doing: 

If you are sending five automated emails after an ebook is downloaded, you might consider bumping it up to one more every week until you get to ten automated emails. 

If you are increasing your Instagram followers, and engagement is high, you might just have a site that doesn’t turn visitors into buyers. You may need a website change. 

If Instagram and your website are performing well, you might consider getting on another social media platform that complements your business. Or, you may just need to start asking more directly for people to buy from you when you are on Instagram. 

We use data to guide our clients, but we also use a fair amount of intuition about what has worked in the past for other successful companies and what solid marketing principles dictate. 

If you’d like a free consultation to discuss aspects of your marketing that may be broken, contact us. We’d love to get an understanding of what you are doing now, in order to guide you to effective marketing and a successful business.