This is a transcript from episode 57 of the OMGrowth podcast

I’m Lanie Lamarre and I wrote a book called Results On Repeat – there’s a link to that in the shownotes – so get your e-reader device or app fired up, get your Results On Repeat, and get your life – because today we’re going to touch on some of the book’s content and talk about what do you do when you marketing efforts aren’t working.

I want to begin this conversation with a very important public service message: CHANGE ≠ IMPROVEMENT.

Just because you change something doesn’t mean you’ll see “better” results than you had before you made that change.

But you do have to make changes if you’re going to see improvements in your results, and that’s what you need to know your numbers for: you need a way to account for which direction things are going in.

A huge mistake I see online business owners make is they try to fix their marketing by trying a new strategy, creating a new offer or moving to a new platform instead of glossing what they already have and know to a high shine. Effective marketing is a wash-rinse-repeat process of gathering information as to how your campaigns work, how they don’t and identifying the gaps where your opportunities for better results are. Over and over and over again.

I’m coming in hot with the disclaimers today, too, because here’s another one: choose a lane.

The truth is that even with a team, it is unreasonable to expect that you will be able to successfully optimize multiple offers, multiple sales strategies, multiple traffic sources, and that you’ll do it all at once. If you have so much going on that your marketing efforts feel like a game of Wack-A-Mole, your first order of business is to make some choices about which offers, strategies and traffic sources you’re NOT going to be focusing on right now (or in some cases, you will drop entirely). Simplify as much as you can in order to strengthen the foundations that you’re working with and THEN you’re in a position to add on more complex strategies, which will require more improvements, and build out an increasingly elaborate yet effective marketing ecosystem.

But how are you going to make those improvements? How do you identify the gaps?

Let’s look at some of the most common marketing problems small online business owners experience and how you can address these:

“PEOPLE AREN’T SEEING MY OFFERS”

You won’t be able to see the holes in your digital marketing strategy if your offers, your content and your strategies aren’t attracting anyone in the first place. As a starting point, you want to have at least 100 people (although 1000 would be a better goal post) whose behaviors you’ll be able to assess as a whole before you consider any kind of optimization mode.

Why? Because conversion rates – which is what we will use to measure the impact of most marketing campaigns – is calculated based on percentages, and you want to have at least 100 people to generate a useful percentage against which you will measure your success.

If the problem is that you aren’t getting enough eyeballs on your offers and content, this is the first order of business. Remembering our ABCs of digital marketing from episode 55: if you’re spending time, money and/or effort on ATTRACTING new audiences but your traffic isn’t reflecting that… there’s a problem with your MESSAGING.

When I say “messaging”, I’m talking about anything you’re using that speaks to or communicates with people. This can mean your copy, but it can also be the images you’re using, the way you’re expressing the value of your offers, the specific features you’re using on the platforms you’re investing in – your messaging is the whole package that makes up the impression you make with the content you’re using to put yourself out there.

Whether you’re using ads, promoting on social media, or collaborating on joint ventures, your message is meant to ATTRACT people who will gravitate to your content and offers.

You know I love an example so let’s use one: Take a specific strategy you’ve been using, like your Instagram posts, and then audit the content you’ve produced to ask yourself:

  • Do these messages connect to and reflect the value of WHAT I’m promoting?
  • Do these messages connect with and reflect the values, struggles or desires of the person with WHOM I am trying to connect?
  • Are my messages interesting/compelling enough that it would stop my audience in its tracks and make them seek out more of what I’m talking about?
  • Am I giving my people a reason to leave what they started doing (i.e. scrolling) to step away and find out more about what I have to say?
  • Am I reaching out to the right people? Is this the audience I’m aiming to show up for? Am I reaching out to the right places where my people are actually hanging out?

If the answer is no to any of these, ask yourself what changes you could make that may change these answers to an emphatic “yes”.

Which brings us back to the importance of choosing ONE lane: you can’t possibly examine all of the ads, all of the social media and all of the collaborative efforts you use to promote one of your offers, all at once. And you certainly can’t work on multiple offers or multiple strategies all at once either.

Choose your lane with one offer, one strategy, one traffic source. You’re going to segment, audit and and improve, segment, audit and improve, over and over again.

The process isn’t exactly glamorous but there are some strong “lessons learned” vibes you’ll be able to carry through every time you do this. Once you nail your messaging, you’ll see how much easier it becomes to replicate your results for different offers, with different strategies, on different platforms, using different campaigns.

But you have to start somewhere and if “not enough eyeballs on the page” is your problem right now, you won’t be able to effectively fix anything else until you address this. 

Unfortunately, the online business world is not the Field Of Dreams where “if you build it, they will come”; you’re going to have to build it AND promote it AND adapt AND promote it again until you’ve given people a reason to care about what you’ve built… and only then will you be in a position to build a better version of what you built in the first place.

“PEOPLE AREN’T CLICKING THROUGH ON MY EMAILS”

Once people sign up for your email list, you’re in the BUILDING phase where relationships and rapport are your goal. You often hear “the money is in the list” but if your list isn’t engaging with what you’re offering to them, that currency may be less valuable than you were aiming for.

Before you start changing or even questioning anything about what you’re doing, I would recommend that you run an email deliverability test using a service like GlockApps to 1) test the deliverability of the emails you send from your regular inbox and 2) test the deliverability of the emails you send using your email marketing service.

If you want more information on this, you can check out episode 41 of the podcast.

You want to make sure that your emails are actually seeing the light of day for the inboxes you’re sending them to before you start changing anything about your actual email content. Again, you always want to start by eliminating the possibility that the tech is an issue before you change anything about your approach.

The next thing I would recommend is to look at HOW you are promoting to your email list: 

  • Are you sending the same emails to your entire list?
  • Would there be a benefit to segmenting your list and changing the messaging within your emails to speak to each segment of your list in a more direct, personalized manner?
  • Are your calls-to-action (CTAs) clear and compelling?
  • Are your links visible, easy-to-find and frequently displayed?
  • Are you giving your people an opportunity to speak out about the campaigns they are NOT interested in hearing about?

This last one is important and in my opinion, it is an overlooked tactic of email marketing. When you give people an opportunity to opt-out of receiving specific messages they aren’t interested in hearing about at this time, you’re also lessening the chances of having your emails sit in their inboxes, being ignored.

You have these, right? When you receive an email promoting something you’re not interested in and you want to stay on that person’s email list, but you start ignoring their next few emails because you know it’s probably about that one offer you’re not into.

This is a problem because by not giving your subscribers the option to opt-out of a specific promotion, you’re training people to start ignoring your emails. The unfortunate part is that this habit of ignoring your emails has a high chance of lasting longer than your promotion will.

Don’t train your email subscribers to ignore you. Instead, be the kind of marketer who gives your email subscribers some agency about what they choose to receive from you and in turn, you’re more likely to be the kind of marketer whose campaigns always feel relevant and whose emails get opened more frequently.

Which brings us to the subject of OPEN RATES.

Yes, your email marketing service will comment on open rates and yes, you want people to open your emails… but I wouldn’t rely on this metric as a benchmark and I definitely would not use it as a measure of your success.

With all the changes being made to data privacy, the disabling of cookie-tracking in many browsers and the increased presence of ad-blockers limiting the collection of personal information, your ability to track which emails have been opened is not as reliable as it once was and you cannot treat this data set as an accurate reflection of your performance.

Having said that, you do want people to open your emails, even if it isn’t a priority metric for you to track.

Examine your subject lines and pay attention to that first line of text that shows up in the inbox, and then ask yourself, “Would I click on that? Am I offering a compelling reason to open this email? Am I connecting with my audience in this subject line?”

But what if they ARE opening and clicking on your emails but they still aren’t picking up what you’re throwing down?

“PEOPLE AREN’T BUYING/OPTING INTO MY OFFER”

OK, so you have eyeballs on your offers – very nice!

You know this because you can see that they’re clicking-through and you have visits to your sales page… but hold the bottle popping because you’re not making sales. You struggle with CONVERTING your audience to sign-up.

This usually means that somewhere along the line, they have an expectation or need that they thought you could help them with… but when they looked at what you were offering, they weren’t convinced you could help them after all. Womp! Womp!

There are a number of reasons why this may be the case.

Again, as with anything, I always recommend that before you start changing anything, you start by confirming that the tech is actually working the way you need it to. Go into “incognito mode” in your browser and test your sales page’s “BUY NOW” buttons and your opt-in forms to make sure they work. Go through the whole sales process to make sure your checkout works the way you intend it to and there isn’t something weird happening with your cart processing that may be impeding people from giving you their money.

When you’ve done that, send someone else through your sales process, too, why-doncha? Sometimes when we’re logged into certain accounts, we won’t see what a client sees and it’s never a bad idea to get a fresh set of eyes on your tech.

You’ll also want to wash-rinse-repeat this process on a desktop, on a tablet and on mobile to ensure there isn’t a device-specific issue with how your checkout process is working (or worse, not working at all!).

Another possibility is you may be rolling out with yet another messaging problem, only this time will be different from the last one. After all, they DID click-through to your site but the problem is that whatever resonated with them when they first clicked to your page didn’t resonate enough when they got there that they were willing to click on the checkout. In this case, you’ll want to ask yourself:

  • Is the messaging in my offer and the messaging in my promotions compatible? Am I saying the same thing and addressing the same issues?
  • Are my calls-to-action (CTAs) all-kinds-of visible, are they crystal-clear and do they repeat frequently through the scroll?
  • Am I targeting the right people with the language on this sales page and can someone who would benefit from my offer clearly see themselves and their needs being represented on this sales page?
  • Am I targeting people who would be or could be prepared to make an actual investment in what I’m offering?
  • Is my price-point clearly visible and is the value I say I’m offering on the sales page reflected in the price at which I’m selling it?

Just as it helps to bring a fresh set of eyes in with your tech, you may want to do something similar with your sales page or your opt-in forms by hiring an expert to audit yours. This is likely to be one of your best optimization options because you’ll have a specialized person looking at your specific offers, your specific sales pages, your specific audience, and then make customized recommendations for improvements.

We’ll talk more about this next week when we go through a case study that will help you more easily identify the opportunities for optimization but if these are topics you want to better apply in your own business, click the link in the shownotes to access Results On Repeat, which is my book on publishing, tracking and improving your digital campaigns and it is officially my lowest-priced offer ever and who DOESN’T want to tap into Results On Repeat, amirite?

I’d also love if you tapped into the awesome sauce I’m dropping over on social media – you can find me on Instagram @omgrowth and on TikTok @omgrowthpod, which are also both linked in the shownotes – and let me SHOW you what these types of talks look like in action.

And I’m glad you’re here and I love that you’re doing the dang thing – it isn’t easy, no matter what someone’s sales page promises you – and you’re STILL here and STILL doing the dang thing and you rock socks.

Talk soon – baiieeee!