Are your Website, Marketing Materials, Ads, and Emails, Going Nowhere?

Even though many CEO’s tell us that they are seeing lots of good activity from their marketing department, they are not necessarily seeing the increase in brand awareness or sales they thought they would see.

 

Often after digging deeper during a round of questions with the executives and marketing teams —we noticed one area that could be improved to get better results— real knowledge about their customer and pain points.

 

To learn about their customers, many businesses run focus groups, surveys, interviews of key customers and more. These activities are good, but they are not perfect.

 

Why?

 

Your customers lie.

 

Why do they lie?

 

Because they don’t want to hurt your feelings, don’t want your sales team to hound them for more business and for lots of other reasons.

 

How can you get around customers lying or avoid telling you what they like and don’t like about your products/services?

 

Look at Data:

If you are like most companies you might not like what you see when you look at the data. But the data is real because your customer’s actions online speak louder than words.

 

It is important to use data from more than one source to get to the truth. Use Google Analytics, Google AdWords Tool, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter engagement and others. This data will lead you to the real truth of what is most important to your customers. With this information, you should be able to put together a better program. But I would encourage you to use one more tactic before settling on a new program.

 

Observation:

Train some of your marketing and sales staff to improve their observation skills. Help them learn how to observe your customers in situations without them knowing will really help you sort out what is going on.

 

Some key areas to pay attention to includes: tone of voice not the words, watching eye moments especially when they look at your marketing material/quotes, and watching body movements such as have they stepped away from being so close to you or lean back in their chair?

 

3- Combining both of these tactics will help you create a better marketing program that focus on your customers’ real needs and pain points.

 

Here is just one example of how combining these tactics worked to help improve one of our clients marketing efforts.

 

Recently we attended a trade show on behalf of the client, as it is a great place to watch customers from a distance.

 

We paid attention to:

  • What in the booth caught their attention—such as a sign, a sample part, a video playing, etc.
  • Did they look around for help?
  • Did they wait?
  • Did they have enough to look at until someone was available?
  • How long do they stay?
  • Did they let the staff to scan his badge?

 

After the event we looked at:

-Open rates on follow up emails

-Visits to the website within a couple days after the show, then a week later

-New followers on social media

 

We sat down to figure out what we needed to change to improve the results. Then we tested, tested, tested such things as: A& B testing on email subject lines, better voice mail messages, added landing pages with specials, and more.

 

If you don’t’ have the time or staff to figure all of this out and test—-NSG is here to help to get your marketing program back on track.

 

Contact me: [email protected]