What to do when Digital Marketing doesn’t bring sales

You see how money from the bank keeps going to Facebook and Google, but no new money comes back from anywhere. Marketing doesn’t make sales. More than half of marketing campaigns are made at a loss, and only one campaign out of 10 returns multiple profits. This is roughly the average picture. Marketing is only one aspect of successful sales. Depending on the company and field, there is also customer service, brand awareness, brand reputation, pricing strategy and, above all, consumer behavior and the national economic situation. There are quite a few aspects that a marketer, sales representative and entrepreneur can influence.

The role of marketing

According to Baltics based digital marketing agency Snowball Marketing there isn’t one specific role, actually. Marketing is a flexible activity that you can essentially assign a task to it yourself. In order to find the best place and task for marketing, the entrepreneur must first decide whether:

  • Need to test the user experience or conversion journey of a website or
    physical store?
  • Do you need to drive more traffic to your website because it is already
    known to convert visitors into customers?
  • Is it necessary to test the effectiveness of tools and the product-market-fit
    of the product/service in order to enter the foreign market?
  • The plan is to perform A/B tests of customer personas and see if there
    have been any changes in the market?
  • Start marketing because you haven’t done it before and now is the right
    time?
  • Are you planning to supplement today’s digital strategy and sales funnel
    with new platforms or campaigns?

Today, the majority of clients turn to us with the wish that they have a more or less specific budget and would like to get new clients – which is a very logical wish and completely feasible. But often we do not start cooperation by launching ads, but we review their current sales pipeline and analyze the whole picture instead.

How to get new clients with digital marketing?

If the client’s goal is to get new clients, we first review:

  • Towards website user experience and UX/UI.
  • Conversion path and data collection (Google Analytics, Google Tag
    Manager, Google Search Console, Hotjar, Facebook Pixel, etc.).
  • CRO low-hanging fruits and purchase journey bottlenecks.

In most cases, the first problem is not a lack of traffic at all, but the purchase of a product/service has been made too complicated for the customer or not enough attention has been paid to the value creation side, and the visitor’s perception of trust does not exceed the purchase threshold.

Only now does marketing enter the picture and start its work. If the landing page is only working at partial capacity and, for example, 40% of visitors abandon the purchase for reasons unknown to us (if conversions are not set up and there is no data reporting), then this actually means almost 65% higher average successful conversion cost for a 10% conversion rate. With marketing, in such a situation, we simply pay the price of a faulty sales tool, and marketing suddenly doesn’t pay off on paper.

If the website works perfectly, but the marketing still does not bring sales

In this case, either the marketing strategy is poorly structured or the customer profiles are inaccurate. A traffic analysis should be carried out and a review should be made to see which of your website visitors actually make a purchase and which are just browsing Some visitors may also have a longer than average shopping journey and should not be excluded right away.

During the analysis, the hypotheses set up in the personas must be compared one by one with the data and corrections must be made if necessary. In addition, we at Snowball Marketing recommend to look at all your digital marketing channels (Google ads, Facebook ads, Instagram ads, LinkedIn ads, YouTube ads, Influencer marketing campaigns, etc.) and comb through their data one by one in Google Analytics 4 views.

It makes it a little easier if you have at some point summarized your marketing data in one place, for example in the Google Looker Studio report. In the case of physical, printed, TV and radio advertisements, the matter is a little more complicated, because these data cannot be measured with such ease and the performance cannot be attributed to one or another channel. These are often interpreted as traffic measured using UTM links, organic traffic, brand search
traffic or social media followers.

It is very easy to say that you only need to better target your ads or adjust your customer profiles (actually, this is several, if not dozens of hours of work), but this is the best way to understand the background of the effectiveness of your marketing activities and to get your campaigns back on track.

Snowball Marketing