For many small business owners, marketing is one of those things that tends to fall to the bottom of the to-do list because, after you’ve spent all day talking to customers, dealing with vendors, and paying invoices, the last thing you want to do is get online and bolster your brand. That, of course, is a huge mistake that can be very costly to your bottom line. But, even if you’re spending your best efforts on your marketing campaigns, some things might not be working no matter how hard you try. If you’re not savvy in the marketing realm, you might not even realize that you need help, though, because many local business leaders simply don’t know what to look for to decide if their efforts are working or not.
Fear not! Surefire Local is here to help. Here are nine signs you need help with your marketing strategy.
1. You’re Not Getting Enough Leads
Before we dive into this one, it’s important that you understand that the quality of leads is more important than the quantity of leads. If you’re getting 1,000 leads every day who never buy anything from you, they’re not doing much for your business, are they? In fact, if you’ve spent money on pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, they could actually be costing you money without giving you anything in return. With that said, any quantity of leads is better than no leads at all. If you’re not attracting quality leads on a regular basis, it’s time to reconsider how you’re deploying your marketing strategy.
The whole point of marketing is to attract new people to your brand. If your efforts aren’t bringing in new leads consistently, there’s probably a problem or disconnect somewhere in your strategy.
2. You’re Getting New Customer Inquiries Outside of Your Service Area
As a local business leader, you have a specified area in which you work. Naturally, you want to attract as many new customers as possible, but it doesn’t make sense to attract people who are outside of your service area. If you keep seeing inquiries from people who are miles away from where you work, you probably need to home in on your geo-targeting efforts.
At Surefire Local, we employ a software called GeoJuice, which helps narrow down your service area so potential customers can see exactly where you do business. By using technologies and tools such as this one, we help our customers pinpoint their service areas so they attract the right potential customers who fall within the applicable geographic boundaries.
3. You Have a High Cost Per Lead
Cost per lead (CPL) measures how cost-effective your marketing efforts are in terms of generating new people who are interested in your products or services. The lower your CPL, the less money you’re spending to acquire new customers, which is a good thing. The higher your CPL, the more money you’re spending to attract new consumers, which could actually end up costing you more than you’re making from their purchases.
Paying to get customers is a normal part of marketing and advertising; paying too much to get customers will eat into your profits and ultimately have a negative effect on your business.
4. You Have No Visibility Into How Your Marketing is Performing
Do you feel like you’re stuck trying to make sense of data that’s been collected in different ways across multiple tools? Just reading that sentence is overwhelming, let alone actually performing the act of collecting and analyzing data. It can be hard to discern heads from tails if you’re not sure what you’re looking at in the first place. Plus, there’s so much data you can gather from your customers online these days that even the most skilled of business owners can get confused now and then.
The key is to use software and tools that help you measure your marketing efforts in easy ways so you can access the information you need and see how well your campaigns are performing without finding yourself in the weeds. It’s important to utilize the power of analytics, but with the right technology, you can do so in ways that don’t make your brain hurt.
5. Creating New Content is Challenging and Takes a Lot of Time
You have a business to run, and you’re great at what you do. Why should you take the time to create content on top of your “day job”?
Because that’s all part of marketing. With that said, content creation can be just as overwhelming as the monitoring of analytics we mentioned a second ago. Writing blogs, updating web pages, making videos, and sharing social posts is exhausting and it can often be its own full-time job.
If you’re feeling stretched in the content creation side of things, consider hiring a freelancer or two who can help you update your content in ways that make both your future customers and the search engines happy. This will save you time and make your money spent a well-worth-it expense. Or you can utilize an all-on-one platform, that makes creating and publishing content easy in just a few clicks.
6. Your Website is Getting Little to No Traffic in Local Search
Your website is like your digital business card. This is where people go to learn more about who you are, what you do, how much you charge, and where you work. You want to send people here because, of course, you have outstanding content on your website that’ll entice people to go further down into the sales funnel.
But you have to get them there first!
If your website is getting little to no traffic in local search, this is one of the huge signs you need help with your marketing. You should be showing up in Google’s Local Pack, displayed on Maps, and easily accessible on the first page of Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs) if you’re using keywords and marketing best practices correctly. If this isn’t happening, it’s time to ask for help.
7. Your Ads are Getting a Lot of Clicks but No Leads
We alluded to this earlier, but it’s worth giving this topic its own section. PPC is a great part of many successful marketing strategies, but you pay for that attention every time someone clicks on your ads. Ultimately, you need those people to convert into paying customers to make the advertising efforts worth it. If you’re getting clicks but no leads, you’re spending a lot of money on absolutely no income. That isn’t a sustainable formula.
When a lot of people are clicking on your ads but not converting into customers, you have one part of the equation right—you’ve created advertisements that are interesting and enticing to a set of viewers. However, when they don’t convert, it means you’ve either targeted the wrong audience or sent the people who clicked on the ads to landing pages or a website that didn’t match the users’ intents. Marketing professionals can help you determine where things went wrong so you can remedy the situation and see a spike in conversions.
8. Your Ads are Generating Leads, but They’re All Bad Quality
Great! People are clicking on your ads, coming to your site, and learning more about your brand. That’s what you wanted all along, right?
Wrong.
A few high-quality leads are better than a million low-quality leads. If you’re not attracting the right audience to your site, you might have a problem with your ads, the way you’re targeting those ads, or the places where people are landing once they get there. This is where segmentation and targeting can become very important to your overall marketing goals.
9. You’re Not Getting Any 5-Star Reviews
Yes, people absolutely pay attention to reviews, so it’s important to accumulate them often. In fact, if your reviews are outdated (even more than two or three weeks old), people may not pay attention to them at all. With that said, you don’t just want any reviews; you want five-star reviews. If you’re not getting those, it doesn’t mean you’re not doing a great job at whatever it is that you do; it means you’re not marketing yourself to those happy customers who could tout your brand to potential customers who might be considering hiring your business.
Partner with Surefire Local Today!
Attend a Surefire Local Marketing Platform demo and see how an all-in-one platform can help solve all of these red flags. Local business marketing is what we do, and we do it quite well. We can’t wait to hear from you!