5 Mistakes Businesses Make that Cost Them Tons of Money

Marketers and marketing teams have always faced a lot of pressure when it comes to driving revenue & job performance. Not much has changed in the decades, where companies still are concerned with revenue growth. That's business. 

But now, the digital age has innovated tools to measure our marketing beyond the P & L.  Because of this, digital marketing is an art and a science that takes brand strategy to get the right recipe for your business.

In this article, you will see how easy it can be to fix some of the common mistakes we see companies make. 

There are 5 actions you can take right now to leverage the tools we have available to us now to stop missing out on opportunities. 

Simple actions to take to increase your chances of being found. 

In this article, you will learn how to attract your ideal customers by learning: 

• The #1 thing every business MUST have to be successful in digital marketing
• Easy corrections to your online presence
• Ways to get more traffic to your offers
• Basic practices to show up on organic search 
• 4 solid metrics to see how you are doing in your marketing effort

Let’s go!

1. Clunky website design, confusing customer journey, unreliable disjointed content, and bad stock photography.

This website, Arngren, was named one of the ugliest websites of 2021. And we can see why!  While this is an extreme example, yes, but it makes the point. 

When someone lands on your website, you better hope it’s engaging and clear. 

It’s that pesky first impression deal. You only get one chance to make a great first impression.

Do this by paying attention to these 3 areas:

1. Your Brand Story
2. Their Customer Experience
3. Your Visual Brand

1. Your Brand Story.  

Without a brand story, your copy means nothing, and isn’t memorable - therefore it’s not repeatable, and downright confusing to me, the visitor. 

A clear, cohesive message that is consistently broadcast will do more for your brand awareness and bank account than anything else.

Because without a great brand story, your marketing tactics will fall flat. 

Creating content without a brand story guarantees misinterpretation of who you truly are and what you are selling.  Inconsistencies breed skepticism, and your visitors leave. Vamoose. Gone. 

And if you are inconsistent about publishing content, well that means you are unreliable. 

Bottom line, be deliberate about the content you are publishing. 

You want to be communicating the truth of who you are - and that takes finesse.

First emerge your brand story. Otherwise you could be scaring off thousands of dollars in potential revenue if you do.

 2.  Customer Experience is next.

To stand out in this age of infobesity, your visitor to your website must have a stellar journey.

When anyone lands on your website, they need to know 3 things:

• Who are you? 
• What are you selling? (and how does it help me?)
• What’s my next step?

In 6 seconds! 

We are busy people with a million little things vying for our attention. When you can answer those questions in 6 seconds, the chances of me scrolling and sticking around increase greatly. 

3. Design creates the experience.

Can you imagine landing on that cluttered and outdated Arngren site above?

Frankly, it’s a mess. You know you would make assumptions about this company. Would you stick around or would you bounce right off the page?

My guess is you are gone. Gone like the wind. 

In 1/10th of a second, we make snap judgments about you, about your business, and decide if we will stay or go. 

A disjointed message, canned stock photos, and jumbled design will communicate a message -- that you have no idea what is troubling me…  of why I’m searching for services or products like yours.

Your design, the placement of your copy and images, along with the colors, fonts and layout, all create an experience for your visitor. 

These days, the most important factor in the design of a website is not that it is beautiful, nor is it that it is interactive and whiz-bang fancy. 

No - 76% of people say it’s actually the ease of finding what they want!

Professional, clean, compelling design does several things: 

• Immediately communicates the value of your business to a prospect
• Creates confidence in your quality and in your professionalism. 
• Draws a customer in and guides them along an experience.

Simply put: your customers can recognize the difference between good and bad marketing design. Not because they’re professional marketers, but because their first impression either creates confidence in you, or not.

You only have a few seconds to convince a potential customer to stick around.  Make it so your visitor can unequivocally say, “ Yes! I want to learn more about these people!”

Now onto the next reckless mistake costing you money...

2. Throwing away thousands of dollars a month into paid ads when you don’t know what you’re doing. 

Are you getting ROAS?

If you don’t know what that term means then you don’t need to be spending a dime on ads. (it’s “Return on Ad Spend”)

Paying to advertise on platforms like Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook can be incredibly profitable. But there is a science to it that many companies fail to realize. 

For example, if you don’t use long-tail keyword search for your campaign, you won’t get conversions. 

Other culprits: 

• bad ad copy
• the wrong image 
• focusing on any leads versus qualified leads (a biggie!)
• not collecting data and optimizing your account.  

If you want to use paid media, then make damn sure it’s the right strategy for you. And don’t ask the ‘ads guy or gal’ if you should do it... Because of course they will sell it to you. It’s their job. If you ask them to get you a ton of leads, they can do that. But are they qualified? (Marketing Qualified Leads = MQL’s)

For example, the On-Facebook Leads platform. 

We learned the hard way on that one. We used this tactic for a few clients thinking it was a great way to grow their list on the cheap. 

But when we called some of the leads who came from this tactic, they didn’t even remember the brand nor did they remember filling out the form, because FB does it for you! 

Now you have a list of unqualified leads that you are paying to have in your CRM. 

I”m not saying there isn’t a role for ads. There is and we use them all the time for us and for our clients - quite successfully. 

But you can throw a lot of money away quickly if you don’t understand what you need to ask for. 

It’s best to incorporate it into your overall brand and marketing strategy. 

Many times we save our clients money because we first do a phase of brand awareness boosted posts, then after we build their following with the cheaper boosted ads, we begin the paid ad campaigns, testing all the way for copy, images and conversions. 

3. Losing up to 94% of your website traffic by ignoring critical technical SEO best practices.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be greatly improved with the right brand story messaging. Long-tail keywords incorporated into your brand story, and monitored for updating, can provide new leads for sure. 

These days, we can’t just count on the Great Google to rain golden leads for you. We get to leverage other tactics to get organic traffic. And there are plenty to consider. 

The best success in digital marketing considers other metrics to determine if you are getting found online by your customers. For example:  

• Metadata: Page title, Header 1 Text, Image Naming
• Site speed: The loading speed of your site is crucial for search engine ranking
• SSL certificates: Security for your website, similar to sealing an envelope before sending it through the mail.
• Sitemaps:  A model of a website's content designed to help both users and search engines navigate the site.
• Schema markup: the language of search engines used to provide information to search engines in order to understand your content.

No need to spend thousands a month on SEO. 

There are many steps you can do yourself. Just search on how to update your website to optimize it for organic search. 

Go for it! Who knows how many leads you’ve missed. 

4. Ignoring marketing metrics 

Digital marketing is a lot of things and I think we can all agree that it can be overwhelming, confusing, and makes you want to stick your head in the sand! 

But this doesn’t mean we ignore valuable metrics to understand what’s working and what’s not in our marketing strategies. 

Here are 4 Simple Ways to Measure Marketing Effectiveness

1. Look at your conversion rates.

Conversion rates tell you whether users are doing what you want them to do, and it’s one of the easiest ways to know if your marketing is working. 

It can refer to any desired action that you want the user to take. For example, filling out a form, booking a call, or making a purchase. It can also be whether or not a person opened an email, or clicked a link in that email to learn more.

When calculating conversion rates, take into consideration the percentage of users who converted in comparison to the total number of users. 

Your conversion rates can tell you a lot about a marketing campaign. For example, if you’ve just launched a Landing Page targeted campaign to build your list with qualified leads, you want to watch your CRM for the number of leads that come in from that Landing Page URL, measured against the number of people who visited that page. (Google analytics)

2. Track your website’s traffic sources.

Knowing where your visitors are coming from can help you to quantify the effects of your marketing campaigns on your company’s website traffic and determine if your strategy is effective.

For example, when running a Google Ads campaign, the generated traffic is key. Google Analytics provides the data you need to see a breakdown of how many visitors visited your website after clicking on an ad, compared to how many were directed to your website after clicking on the link from a social media post. 

3. Analyze your sales funnel.

How well do you know how your sales funnel is performing? You should be able to compare your marketing efforts with the number of leads from the funnel, and the subsequent revenue from those leads - your conversions. 

If you’re not generating enough website visitors (leads) or convincing enough website visitors to convert and submit a form (Marketing Qualified Leads, MQL’s), your marketing strategy isn’t as effective as it needs to be. On the other hand, if your campaigns generated an abundance of MQLs who later became customers, you know that marketing has had a positive impact on business.

4. Calculate your Return on Investment (ROI).

To measure marketing effectiveness, you need to know if your campaigns were worth spending valuable time and money on. To figure this out, you’ll want to calculate your Return on Investment (ROI).

Your ROI is a measure of how much revenue you’ve generated through your marketing efforts in comparison to how much you’ve spent. An effective marketing campaign should always have a positive ROI as the underlying goal of marketing is to acquire customers and generate revenue. If your ROI is negative, there may be inefficiencies in your funnel or you may need to revisit your marketing strategy, focusing on tactics that require a lower investment.

Always keep your marketing efforts aligned with your business goals.

5. Engaging a marketing firm too fast without considering the overall strategy.

I see it all the time. A prospect schedules a brand audit. We get on Zoom only to discover they have paid thousands to a marketing firm to provide a singular marketing strategy. 

Isolated from the overall goals of that business, of that brand, we call this being “siloed.” 

They were looking for a marketing firm to help them increase traffic, leads, and sales for the company. They had talked to a few providers, and there was one that excited them, promising the moon. 

Within one short hour, they committed to that strategy! The elation is intoxicating! 

But is what they are proposing to do following the overall brand strategy? 

• Did the firm really take the time to get to know you? 
• Do they fully understand your company and your vision? 
• Do they know your brand strategy for this year, the next 5 years, and into the future? 

Or did they make assumptions that their strategy will work for you without knowing who you are and what your goals are? 

You want to watch out for templated recommendations that are not customized - for promises that seem too good to be true. 

Because what I know for sure is that In order to see sustainable, remarkable growth, we have to be strategic. 

Marketing can get expensive and cause you to fail if you don’t have an overall brand strategy - specific to you and your goals. 

The #1 action for any business is to Invest in Brand Strategy and derive a Marketing Plan that gets results:

1. Your Brand Story 
2. Your Visual Brand
3. A Brilliant Customer Experience

A brand strategy process produces all you need to build a strong foundation that will grow, scale and give you the success you dream of. 

Talk to us to learn how our strategic Soul Story Brand can meet your company's unique needs, goals, and challenges.