11 reasons you’re not seeing ROI on your marketing spend

These days, marketing budgets are tight and every cent spent needs to be accounted for, and that makes calculating a correct ROI even more important. Do this using key indicators to determine whether your marketing efforts are converting into actual cold, hard cash coming back into your business.

However, sometimes despite your best efforts at making a marketing splash, you just don’t see the pay-off, and it’s more than possible that some simple things could be tripping you up without you even knowing it.

Here are a few points to help you figure out why you just aren’t getting the ROI you need:

• Effort without direction
  The first thing to look at is your marketing strategy, or your lack of one. Even the cleverest marketers with the most creative concepts need a clear and coherent strategic plan to bring everything together. A good strategy looks at your target market, their journey to purchase, and the resources at your disposal, to create a roadmap with SMART goals and key performance indicators to keep your marketing efforts on course. A good strategy is tough to develop but luckily there are industry experts who can help.

• You have a content crisis
  Content doesn’t necessarily mean running a blog – it could mean adverts, emailers, and yes, social media too! Good content should be appropriate for the platform, excellently written and relevant to your customer … and anyone who has tried can tell you that creating slick, sexy content doesn’t happen at the snap of a finger. But if your website is a bore, your Facebook page makes people snore and reading your mailers is a chore, you are going to lose out. So be ruthless about content quality.

• Silos are silly
  Sales thinks that marketers have their head in the clouds and marketers are frustrated by the sales department’s focus on sealing the deal. Time to end that sibling rivalry as it could be costing you big! Sales and marketing teams should be working closely in tandem, but if wrangling that sounds daunting, don’t worry – there are a number of strategies that you can employ to make it work

• All your eggs are in one basket
  People have different preferences. Some enjoy reading blog posts, while others only have the attention span for a quick soundbite on Facebook or Twitter. Others enjoy the visual medium of YouTube or the detail of an ebook. The point is, don’t assume that churning out a few blog posts works as content creation. You have to coordinate your marketing efforts across numerous platforms to reach your entire market segment.

• You’re too pushy
  Your job is to figure out how to draw people in to buy your product, and hopefully become brand ambassadors themselves! You want to engage with them, not to spam them. You can’t annoy someone into buying from you and if you overload people with irrelevant or excessive information, you will drive them away.

• You aren’t pushy enough
  Conversely, you can’t update your blog and social media sporadically, or send out an email campaign every couple of months, and expect to stay top of mind. There is a sweet spot when it comes to being consistent without being obnoxious.

• You forgot the call to action
  Every aspect of your marketing plan has been put out into the world to provoke a response or generate a reaction from the customer but sometimes that can get lost in the campaign. Make sure that it is crystal clear what the next step is – for example, where to find you, how to buy or where to get more information.

• You need to follow through
  When customers contact you with an enquiry, respond to a campaign, or post on your social media, are you poised to respond quickly and effectively? If you let leads or interactions fall through the cracks, you end up looking lazy, uncaring, or incompetent. So before you pull the trigger on a campaign, make sure you that have the resources to follow up on the results.

• Don’t let your content flounder in cyberspace
  So you wrote a Pulitzer-worthy blog post full of smart and salient information? Why just pop it on your blog and leave it there then? You need to actively drive traffic by cross posting and promoting on other platforms. And if you can re-share relevant posts that you have written in the past, use the opportunity. The key word is relevant. Don’t spam.

• You’re inconsistent
  People trust and value consistency. Sure, a savvy marketer knows that your tone and approach varies according to the channel. A Facebook post and a white paper use different language, for example. The message, however, should stay the same and so should your underlying brand promise. This is why a strong strategy is so important.
• You don’t monitor and measure
  It sounds obvious but you can’t calculate your ROI unless you put measurement standards in place. Clicks on posts, page views, downloads, leads generated, sales conversions – different campaigns can be measured differently but put numbers to everything and then analyse that data to find your strengths and correct your weaknesses.