Before You Blame Marketing: Identifying problems and their solutions

One of the things that people need to decide within their business and their marketing is what the true source of the blockage is, before they decide what to do about it. Some things can be greatly affected by your marketing and actually not be a marketing problem.

I often get asked about pricing and what their offer is and what their niche is and whether that’s correct. Those aren't actually marketing decisions. They are business decisions. The reason why I define them as business decisions and you might disagree with me here is that they also impact every other part of your business, especially your profit and loss.

Welcome to the Digital Hive Podcast where we talk all things digital marketing. I’m Emma, a marketing strategist and coach for business owners who aren’t short on ideas but want support with the strategy and tactics to get their message out into the world.

Those business decisions include what you offer, who your audience is, what steps they have to go through to buy from you and the price.

The marketing is how you communicate those things.

What you offer probably has come from the understanding of a need within the market. What it does or how it works should be a reaction to the meeting of that need, rather than what is currently popular, or easily communicated, especially since the gaps are usually where the success stories come in.

Who your audience is might come out of market research or it might come out of just historically who has bought your product. The market as in the people who potentially would buy your product, they kind of decide who your audience is by self assessing. The marketing could turn them away, but in general who you serve is a business decision. An example of this is Stanley. They had a product that must have been objectively good but it was primarily for tradies, truckers, not aesthetic girly pop people.

However as soon as Stanley recognised that kind of person was interested in their product they came out with so many colour ways it wasn't even funny. To the point where these drink bottles are meant to be saving the environment and yet people have like 20 of them.

The story could be wrong but all that I have heard is that it was a surprise and then they got onto the train with their customers.

How you get people through to a sale should be a business decision and a sales decision, not a marketing decision. It shouldn't be decided that everyone else is doing a discovery call and that way we can have a discovery call, and then people will just know what that means. Instead, it should be tailored to the minimum number of interactions where people would know what you offer, fully understand what the price is and can decide that that is a good fit for them.

The market also decides if your price is correct for them, compared to other competitors, and whether they can afford it, but you should set it to cover your costs and make at least some profit.

Since the marketing is how you communicate these things, it’s how you get that offer in front of the right people, and communicate the features and benefits, and how they can get it, in such a way that the price is understood as matching the value. Ideally, these decisions should be made at a business level to suit the market, and therefore good marketing will bring in revenue.

This issue of where the problem originated becomes especially murky when a business doesn’t have a separate salesperson, or the sales are done through a website, which is usually managed by the marketing department. However, sales and marketing are two different business functions to me, and should either be two departments, or two hats worn by the same person.

At the outset and at pivotal times in your business or the economy, one of those business decisions might need to be reviewed to keep up with the market. That is when it is common to jump into hyperfixating on the marketing of the offer and ignoring all the other parts of the puzzle.

So how do you tell if it’s a marketing problem, or a consequence of one of those many business decisions? You number crunch it.

Just like any good salesperson would, where they’d have numbers for leads, and first calls, and proposal opens and successful sales tracked through a funnel, we need to break down each of your marketing interactions into steps, so that you can tell which step is causing a drop off.

If you solely focus on revenue alone, which is a common trap, you’re more likely to go down a path that doesn’t ultimately lead to progress.

In the past I’ve done a series of episodes on the marketing funnel I prefer to think in. That can help you to better understand which step of your customer’s experience you could improve on to best suit the problem at hand. It can also help you to identify replacements where things aren’t working anymore to better replace them at the stage that customer is at. I’ll link those in the show notes.

Ideally we’d be getting much more granular than those steps, to limit the guessing game, and better understand all the micro interactions along the way.

You could go crazy here, so you’ll have to find your own balance of what you monitor, but I would recommend tracking as much as possible to give you the data in the future in case you need it.

You can often get ahead of the problems and spot them sooner, when you regularly watch your analytics, with an open mind.

In a more manual sense, when you collate a list of what you’re changing and when and monitor your data over time, you can assess when a shift has happened, good or bad, alongside what other changes were made at that time across the business to reduce some of the mystery.

Did your email open rate drop after running a giveaway which had sent a surge of new subscribers to your list with the hopes of winning something and that’s now over? Did you change your ad campaigns, and now the ads portion of traffic to your website has risen, but they’re all first time visitors?

This is often what marketing experience brings. It’s the understanding of the possible impacts of certain adjustments, overall or within your specific business.

When you can track and point to smaller shifts, up or down, the year over year and quarter to quarter shifts can be much better understood and when there is something that needs your attention, you’re much more likely to spot it sooner.

It sounds kind of negative but we do need to accurately assign blame, so that we can fix the issue. Not blame on a person, but blame on the root cause of the issue which may be an unintended consequence.

An example of this could be that you have a massive drop off at the point in the checkout where people both enter their delivery information and they see the specific pricing for shipping, usually for the first time.

There can be some A/B testing that gets done within this analysing to further refine the source, since there’s often more than one distraction at any one step, and when there may have been 5 changes made in any given week that could have contributed. In that specific case, there are a few things that could be done about making the entering of their address easier, so that ultimately you could likely isolate most of that drop to the shipping price and some to general distractions. You can test a couple things to fully identify that the shipping costs is a contributing factor to the exiting, including testing that shipping price.

While there is a lot that is subjective, when you have a reasonably sized focus group of people on your website, this can get more objective through the data.

You can use tools to run automated A/B tested of versions of pages, or pricing, but you can also test week vs week before and after changes, with a grain of salt. Having a try and testing a theory is a great way to make progress. It won’t be perfect but you’ll have more information to work with either way.

It is true that it can be hard to tell what the problem is when there’s not enough people in the mix to make a focus group of sorts in your analytics. One rejection can feel major when it’s 100% of the feedback you got that week. That lack of numbers is usually a marketing problem, but you’d be surprised how much market research you can do without any customers and how much you can learn from the small successes in your marketing. Taking revenue out of the equation, you can tell a lot about your subject matter and the general interest in it without the scale of a business with a longer history. That interest can be judged by comparing content, and by having one on one conversations. It is possible to find your people elsewhere like Facebook groups or other online or offline communities instead of trying to get them to come to find you through posting content and feeding an algorithm.

It’s the same as a minimum viable product but for marketing.

There’s a lot of pausing in this process, but here is another. It can be incredibly useful to pause to make a list of possible solutions, not to run in guns blazing with whatever first comes to mind. Instead, brainstorming as many options as you think of, and fleshing those out with your team, to fully understand all of the consequences of each option.

You’d be surprised how quickly it’ll all come off the rails when a series of 10 of these decisions are made in a panic.

I wanted to take some time in this episode to talk about what happens when it isn’t a marketing problem, but marketing has been chosen as the solution.

Sometimes, you might simply have to keep that shipping price for costing reasons, and there’s no real way around it that makes sense. That shipping price, while it isn’t a marketing decision, can create a problem that marketing may now try to solve.

But it is an all too common fault to rush in, and later question why your marketing performance dipped.

Marketing can help to minimise the negative impacts of so many of your business functions, but you’ll need to understand and consciously recognise across your business or within yourself if you’re operating solo, that this is now a problem that you have, and that marketing is now going to try to fix it. The changes that need to be made will impact other analytics, as well as your costs so it would be wise to expect this to take time, and that some analytics might never recover as long as this added focus is existing. At a lower conversion rate, to make the same sales, you could get more of the right people to your website. That would be a marketing solution to a business problem, with many options to try, but it will have effects on your marketing analytics and likely your spend, going forward.

Before you go ahead with the final decision, or final for now, profit margin enters the chat. Everything costs money, but when conversion rates go down, and everything else stays the same, revenue goes down too effecting your profit margin. Same thing goes for sales staying the same and costs going up. To keep things productive and profitable, and to give yourself a bit of a container to work inside of, you’ll benefit from pausing to pick a priority, of which analytic you optimise for next, and how far you’re willing to go to fix it.

Marketing can drive revenue, but there will be times when everything isn’t going up, and that’s what we want to plan for, so that our performance is held accountable accurately, and improved consistently.

Identifying the true cause, the potential options and documenting the solution alongside other changes you’re making, are all important steps in minimising those problems as they arise, without going off on a marketing tangent.

Thank you for joining me for this episode of the Digital Hive Podcast.

I hope this helped you to think of some areas where you could clarify the root cause of a problem and move forward to fixing it.

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