If you are a small business and Digital marketing is not working for you the way you expected, this piece is for you. 

You might be wondering how much you need to spend on Google Ads and free product listings before you see some actual outcome from all the marketing techniques. While many start-ups and small businesses have managed to attain good recognition from the Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads, it is not guaranteed that your company will gain customers the moment you put up an ad on Google. It takes about six to twelve months before you actually see a positive ROI. Sometimes, it might very well be the case where you suffer an abysmal Return of Investment (ROI) after pooling money into these marketing aspects.  

List of strategic fixes for your marketing campaign:  

1. Take it as a growth experiment and not as a failure 

Questions you should be answering: 

• Would you have found out whether the digital marketing strategy is working for your business or not without this experiment? 

• Are your neighbouring businesses or competitors having a similar strategy? 

 The path toward brand prominence on Internet is not an easy one. For example: while you will find billions of users posting pictures on Instagram, only a few of them actually gain 20 thousand followers and become influencers. It might be true that some people become get viral overnight bust consistent transaction takes consistent efforts. Most of us have to work hard and maintain a good social media strategy before we gain popularity. Of course, there will be losses and there will be many lessons to learn, but the fact that you are still okay exploring makes you better than 70% of the people who are just too afraid to take risks. Be patient, and you will be rewarded with customers very soon! 

2. Rethink your brand position 

• Does the personality of the brand convey what it actually stand for? 

• Are there other creative ways to pitch your product?  

 Brand position in digital marketing is so much more than simply putting up a logo and a tagline for your brand. If you have a clothing brand, you need to categorise it as a luxury/value/fast fashion/ethnic/bold fashion statement brand. If you are into selling shoes, you could pitch as a comfort/sport/casual brand. All the brand elements such as the logo, the Instagram posts, the tagline as well as the product packaging should reflect your brand position.  

3. Rethink your Marketing copy  

Your marketing copy is the story that you are selling to your prospective customer.  Questions you should be answering: 

• Is your marketing copy reflecting the brand position? 

• Is it engaging enough that the customer is persuaded to learn more about your product    

As you must already know, your brand marketing copy goes a long way to generate quality leads for you. If you have already invested in email marketing and have not seen any improvements, maybe you should switch to some other copywriter. They can form a persuasive and clear-cut copy for your brand that will enhance customer inquisitiveness. Also, ensure that your marketing copy has a Call-To-Action or a CTA that will take you the extra mile in order to secure clients. 

4. Reach out to the leads for repeat purchases 

While you should always be on the lookout for newer clients, never forget the old faces who have already trust you. This is especially true if your product is in FMCG domain. If it is in electronics or furniture domain,you might want to wait for 2-5 years before you again reachout again.  The bottomline is that a good brand will always have a high percentage of repeat customers, that is, those customers who have already bought your products and have come back for more purchases. If you have around 50-60% repeat customers, then you should know that your brand has been giving out products of excellent quality.  

5. Ask the existing customers/ leads to refer someone who would love your product 

Research say that 54% businesses gain more clients by following up on pre-existing clients. When companies such as Amazon started, they would give out referral codes to their customers and offer them some good deals if they can refer more customers to those websites. Even newletters follow this route. You can use Rewardful.com to turn your biggest customers to ultimate marketeers. Ask those clients to refer your brand to their acquaintances in exchange for something that interests them creates a win-win situation. This is also an excellent strategy to re-use your marketing copy and see if it actually delivers.   

6. Ask on public forums like Reddit for feedback 

In today's age of the internet, you can gain access to information regarding anything with a simple Google search on your phone. But, if you look forward to have a personalized feedback, reddit community can come to rescue. All you have to do is: 

• Pick appropriate sub-reddit 

• Articulate your problem well 

• Ask specific questions 

Once you have made up your mind about asking questions to like-minded people on Reddit, visit the subreddits like r/business, r/startups, etc. and there, you will find all the answers. Reddit itself has more than 52 million daily active users. If you post about your company on one of the frequently visited subreddits, you can easily catch the attention of at least a few hundred thousand people who might care about your product even if that is for a very brief period.  

7. Write on LinkedIn//Indie hackers about your experience  

Every prominent business should have its own social media pages. You must create a LinkedIn page and an Instagram page the moment you decide to promote your company. 98% social marketers say that Instagram is the most powerful tool for spreading the word about your business. It is great to colloborate with influencers  from these sites to talk about your marketing journey, learn from other people's experiences and implement those lessons in your brand campaign! Talk about what the losses have taught you so that others learn from yor mistakes You will surely find people eager to share some advice with you that you can use in the long run.  

8. Make a SEO/ technical issues checklist for your next campaign 

Example of Checklist in SEO: 

• Removing unbranded key words 

• Avoid spending on poor performance key words 

• Avoid targeting broad match of key words   

Example of Checklist in Technical issues: 

• Check for broken internal links 

• Optimize Meta descriptions  Check out this space for entire checklists 

9. Implement the feedback at the earliest, but try to cut costs doing the changes in-house 

Money constraint has been one of the best constraints that spurs creativity. Our advice here would be to go about your new marketing campaign as judiciously as possible. You can make changes to your marketing copy by yourself by taking examples from pre-existing copies through canva or Vengage. Once you gain traction and the popularity in your brand, you can appoint professionals to take care of these jobs. 

10. Note down the plan for your next marketing experiment 

Now that you have a clear idea of all the things you should take away from the loss that you just suffered because of your digital marketing campaign, make a note about it. List down the things you need to do to gain prominence, the KPIs in a particular order and start working accordingly.   This documentation will be valuable for future reference. 

Conclusion 

"Micro speed, macro patience is the key to success" - Gary Vee 

In the US, 71% of small and medium-sized businesses are using social media to gain an audience. The social media game is a long haul and you can't gain overnight success here. You need to be smart about it, and you need to be able to learn from your past mistakes. Always know when to ask for leads, how to send email marketing copies, how to cut down extra costs by doing the work yourself, and in no time at all, you will find the right of customers knocking at your doors for your products! With this, we come to the end of this article. If you found it helpful, do check out all the other posts on our website. Share this with your friends and help them out as well. Thank you for reading this article and have a great day!