Why Your Digital Marketing Strategy Does Not Work

Too often I find myself having a conversation about someones digital marketing strategy and their sales funnel.

They either just spend $X building a sales funnel or they would like me to quote one for them.

Alarm bells begin to ring.

Wait, you’d like me to build out your entire sales funnel for your digital marketing strategy?

From scratch?

DING DING DING.

WHOAAA!

Hold on a minute… lets back up 10 years.

There are a lot of different reasons why your digital marketing strategy does not work, but chances are it isn’t because you don’t have some extravagent sales funnel with multiple landing pages, sales pages, squeeze pages for upsells, limited time offers, FOMO, 3 automated email sequences with 6 emails in each being drip fed to your subscribers… Oh and lets not forget, the ‘LAST CHANCE’ offer for good measure.

Unfortunately a lot of people have spent thousands of dollars building out these sales funnels as part of their digital marketing strategy only to discover they didn’t work.

For one very good reason.

They haven’t figured out how to consisently generate leads and sales in the first place.

So why did they spend $$$ to build out a complex funnel?

Because they were adviced by ‘experts’ that they needed a sales funnel. Unaware that they probably had a sales funnel already and it didn’t work. Which means building an even bigger sales funnel DEFINITELY won’t work.

Let me explain.

What a Sales Funnel Is:

A sales funnel is simply the points A to Z where someone finds you, then buys from you. That’s it.

The shortest route is your first sales funnel.

Someone visits your website, picks up their phone and gives you a call and becomes a client.

SALES FUNNEL.

Someone discovers your post on Instagram, clicks your website link and buys the products from your website.

SALES FUNNEL.

Anyone taking an action and completing a purchase or becoming a customer, entered and exited your sales funnel.

So if you’ve got a sales funnel in place (albeit a short sales funnel) the best digital strategy is to add another layer to your sales funnel.

Building Your Sales Funnel (the right way)

Lets use our second example and expand on it.

Now you know someone saw your product on Instagram, got interested enough to visit your website and purchase it… well it’s time to expand your sales funnel.

My first recommendation would be to begin advertising on Instagram & Facebook (Owns Instagram and same advertising platform) to magnify your reach to potential customers.

So lets add on to your sales funnel like this;

Congratulations – you’re now winning new business through your social media marketing and advertising!

This then creates new opportunities to expand your sales funnel.

Why expand your sales funnel

The whole reason sales funnels became ‘a thing’ is because potential customers were being lost.

So when we see the current sales funnel with Instagram posts, and paid Facebook and Instagram ads, we know a couple of key things happened;

1. Customers enter your email database
2. Some potential customers viewed your sales page, but didn’t purchase

If we keep this sales funnel as it is, we lose potential future sales that we could capitalise on.

Email Automation

Now is a great time to build out some email automation for your existing customers. This will depend on what you sell, but lets say it’s a 45 day makeup or beauty routine product.

An obvious email automation would be to calculate the average arrival time that your product gets delivered. Then add on 45 days and your happy customer will need to open their next product purchase.

That means 52 days after they order, they will want a new package ready to go.

If this were the case, we could probably automate an email to be sent 30 days after the initial purchase. The email would encourage the customers next purchase so it arrives before their existing product runs out.

Re-targeting Ads

The next stage of the funnel to add on would be to re-advertise to people who showed an interest in your product, but didn’t follow through with their purchase.

There can be all kinds of different reasons why someone didn’t make a purchase on the first visit.

• The boss just walked into their office…
• They wanted to wait for their next paycheck which comes in 3 days time…
• They thought they would check out other options first…

Whatever the case, re-targeting ads are ALWAYS the highest converting and best return on investment for anyone who advertises.

So now, we’ll turn on re-targeting so website visitors (but not purchasers) are reminded to make a purchase.

As you can see, your sales funnel is beginning to grow.

The more you add, the more you can continue to add as each layer begins to add profit to your business.

You could;

• Create blog posts to generate organic traffic from search engines (SEO Strategy)
• Create free guides to help potential customers (Email Strategy)
• Create Google Ads to drive more people searching for your products to your website
• Introduce pop-up opt’ins to your website for first time purchasers to receive 10% off (Email)
• Create YouTube videos explaining how to use your product (SEO Strategy)
• Advertise your most successful YouTube videos (Paid Advertising)
• and so on… and so on…

But one thing has been overlooked for ease of explanation to get this far.

We’ve made an assumption that everything we’re adding works. And that isn’t always the case.

Remember the most important step I mentioned earlier?

Figure out how to consisently generate leads and sales in the first place

Your organic post on Instagram worked in generating sales. But WHY and HOW did it work?

These are important questions to ask and even more importantly – ANSWER.

WHY did that post work?

HOW did that generate sales?

Those questions are important to ask every time you add on a new piece to your sales funnel.

Break Points That Kill Your Digital Marketing Strategy

When you turn on Paid Social Media Advertising, if the ads do or don’t work, you must ask WHY.

Did it work because of the offer you made in the ad (20% off the sales price)?

Did it fail to work because your video of the product was low quality and not many people clicked on your ad?

Whatever the case, looking at break points (where something breaks and people don’t become a customer) is critical in developing a great digital marketing strategy.

This is often overlooked or taken for granted. But I can assure you, there are many reasons why your digital marketing does NOT work.

The smaller and simpler your sales funnel, the easier it is to find and fix the problem.

BUT…

If you do decide to spend $$$ and build an entire sales funnel at once, you’ll often be wondering what area of the sales funnel works and what doesn’t. Even worse, if an offer isn’t strong enough, or your social proof is weak, or your brand messaging stinks… you’ll need to fix it in EVERY-SINGLE-PIECE of your sales funnel.

For some companies, that could be 40-50 different marketing assets.

And ‘fixing it’ often isn’t a one-time solution. It often requires multiple passes to get it right.

Which is why we always say…

Start small, get it right.

Then add the next logical piece, get it right.

Then the next.

Then the next.

And so on.

If your digital marketing strategy does not work you might want to re-think your approach. If someone is selling you on a complete sales funnel for big $$$ as the answer to your problems but you haven’t made many (or any) sales… avoid them and save your money.

If you like our common-sense approach to implementing a digital marketing strategy that does work, then contact us today for a proposal.

We’re experts in digital marketing strategy and development of sales funnels through all digital marketing methods.