Need Better Advertising Results?
No one would ever say NO to better advertising results. But how? Advertising spending is growing at 6.3% annually, but advertiser satisfaction is dropping. You’re not alone if that’s your own experience.
Today we explore how to get better advertising results in 3 steps:
- Measure First
- Remove Obstacles to Success
- Don’t Give Up
Let’s explore each step to better results in more detail.
You Can’t Manage What You’re Not Measuring
Carpenters live by the adage, “measure twice, cut once.” And if you’re not measuring the outcomes of your advertising efforts, you’re making it really hard to know where better results can be found.
The beauty of this age of digital marketing is that we can measure almost everything. But we’ve found over the years that one of the most valuable measurements for making better advertising decisions is failure.
Knowing where the customer journey is dead-ending can tell you a lot about where to find better advertising results.
- Where are website sessions ending?
- Where are carts being abandoned?
- Which landing pages convert, versus which landing pages don’t?
These measurements of WHERE the customer abandons you point you toward where to look for WHY customers abandon you. And that’s where improvement can be found. We call this your growth funnel.
Remove Obstacles to Success
Once you know WHERE your advertising most frequently fails to create a new customer, you can put yourself in the shoes of that potential customer and examine WHY the process stopped.
“Turn your wounds into wisdom”
– Oprah winfrey
Most often, advertising fails to convert when we create too many obstacles for customers to become customers. Or potential customers end up somewhere they don’t expect… Or we “asked customers to marry us” when they’re not ready yet, and we didn’t give them the option to “keep dating” us instead…
Oprah Winfrey is famous for the saying, “Turn your wounds into wisdom.” This is another way of saying, “Work Smarter.” And that’s the underlying theme here.
Whenever you see a point in your customer journey where you know you should be getting better results, try different tactics and measure for improvement.
Success is Almost Always Preceded by Failure
Most marketers give up just when they’re on the precipice of success. In a world that expects instant gratification, better advertising results often requires patience, persistence, and a structured approach.
The Bad News First. Like almost everything else, advertising just doesn’t work the same way today as it did even 10 years ago, and certainly different than 20 years ago. If you’re lucky enough to have a business that’s been around that long, it makes sense that your “tried and true” tactics may not be working nearly as well, or even at all.
Now the Good News. There is a way to achieve better results. You just have to be willing to take steps like these to go about it in an orderly way. And the digital environment offers you ways to experiment to find the right strategies with lower risk. That way, you don’t blow your whole budget on anything that hasn’t proven it will work.
Most of our clients have great businesses that are just stuck. We find what’s got them hitting the wall, and help them determine whether they need to go up, over, or around the wall to get back to better results.
And Hard Work on the Front End Helps, Too
We would argue that the number one path to better advertising results is simply better planning on the front end. Or ANY planning at all.
If you feel unorganized, you probably are. Here is our latest free marketing workshop, 3 Reasons Advertising Fails & How To Avoid Them.
And if you’re looking for a structure designed for today’s marketing challenges, please take a moment to review our marketing philosophy here at Source Local Media:
- Our Basic Marketing Formula
- Our Unique Bullseye Digital Marketing Method
- Visualizing Your Growth Funnel & Marketing ROI
If you’d like to talk about any aspect of your marketing, we offer a free initial consultation that provides our team the chance to get to know you and your business better by hearing what’s frustrating you and offering free education from our experienced perspective.
If that’s too much right now, just sign up for our free local marketing newsletter that comes in your e-mail periodically. It’s packed with more articles like this one.
And thanks for visiting today.
