No Results? Why We Recommend a Marketing Diet for Your Brand
If you’ve ever experienced allergies or chronic health issues, one of the solutions that may have been suggested to you would be to try an elimination diet. If you’ve never heard of an elimination diet, here’s the basic definition:
e·lim·i·na·tion di·et (noun)
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Essentially, you take everything away, and then introduce it back into your diet one at a time to see what works (and what doesn’t).
This idea of an elimination diet can be applied to other aspects of your life, including marketing your health & wellness business.
Many businesses we talk with our struggling to see results from their marketing. Most of the time they are also working on limited budgets – and limited time.
Applying an elimination diet or, as we like to call it, a marketing diet to your current marketing strategies can help you identify what’s really working for your business – and what’s wasting your time and money. Resulting in a plan that is more cost and results effective.
Follow these 6 steps to implement your marketing diet
1. Assess your current marketing campaigns and how each is performing.
Make a list of all of your current marketing initiatives – don’t leave anything out! During our Discovery process with clients, we dig into what they’re doing to ‘market’ their business. About 9 times out of 10 we uncover additional initiatives than what they originally reported on. So, for this step, be sure to including everything – i.e. blogging, social media marketing, digital advertising, print advertising, networking events, tradeshows, email marketing, influencer campaigns, etc.
Once you’ve made a comprehensive list, write down how much time you’re investing in each tactic and how much you’re spending (marketing, advertising, supplies & other resources).
Lastly, evaluate to the best of your ability, performance in the last 6 months to a year. Here’s an example of initiatives for a business with the goal of increasing new clients:
2. Pause all current marketing efforts and select the one (maybe two) that is driving the greatest results.
In the above example, if new clients was your goal, you would want to nix the influencer campaign and keep the Facebook ads – possibly reallocating influencer budget to the Facebook ads.
Keep in mind, if you’re a new brand and your goal is increasing awareness and the influencer campaign is generating 1.5M views or website visits a month, the outcome of your evaluation may be different. This reinforces the importance of setting your goals before you start your campaigns in order to effectively monitor success.
Take a hard look at everything on your list, how much money you’ve spent, and the ROI of each marketing initiative. Pause everything that isn’t – at a minimum – generating a return on your investment. Seriously. Do it.
We’ve seen entrepreneurs make two critical mistakes when it comes to time investment in marketing – 1. Not giving things enough time to run their course and 2. Continuing with things because they feel they already invested too much and don’t want to quit now.
In this case, if you’ve consistently invested resources into campaigns that have been running for over 6 months and you still aren’t seeing a return – pause them. If this freaks you out too much, know that you can always come back to them at a later time.
We’ll venture to guess that the top performing initiatives are true to your unique differentiators and brand promise, as well as your audience’s goals, challenges, frustrations and needs. Either way, be sure to take a look at this to ensure you’re aligned in all aspects.
3. Evaluate your *true* marketing budget.
Be honest about how much you can really afford to spend each month on your marketing. Another way to look at this is get honest with yourself about how much you’re willing to spend to get a lead and how much you’re willing to spend to acquire a new customer.
Then evaluate what that means for your strategy moving forward, and how you will gauge success based on these numbers.
If you find that channels or campaigns are exceeding what you feel comfortable spending, consider pausing these first while you reevaluate your strategy as a whole.
4. Invest your resources into what’s working best, and stick with it.
It can be incredibly tempting to jump to ‘the next big thing’ in marketing, or try out something you heard about on a webinar, or saw in a Facebook ad. Resist the urge! When you fall victim to spreading yourself across numerous digital channels and running countless campaigns side-by-side, you run the risk of depleting your resources and reducing your ability to track your initiatives.
If you followed steps 1 through 3, you can trust that you’ve identified initiatives that will work for YOU and your business. Stick with these and continue to diligently track results and optimize based on your findings.
With today’s hopelessly inundated consumers, you almost certainly won’t see results right away. Implementing a new strategy or optimizing an existing can take time, focus, and effort. Use the time provided during your marketing diet to hone in on one particular channel or campaign for a few months at a time and use the insights you uncover to successfully grow from there.
5. Track results.
We can sometimes feel like a broken record when we discuss this step. But it has to be said, as we continue to encounter businesses that are not tracking anything. First, set your goals so you know what to track, second, track them.
You can’t possibly know what’s working and what’s not if you don’t have the analytics to back it up. Make sure you have some sort of tracking in place, for example, Google Analytics for your website and Cyfe or Sprout Social for your social.
6. Rinse and repeat.
Following the above steps will help you gain amazing clarity around what’s working, and what’s not. Leveraging what you discover during your marketing diet to implement additional tactics down the road, will help to guarantee the success of those new campaigns. Rather than feeling overwhelmed and ‘spread too thin’ with your marketing, you’ll feel confident, collected and excited about the results you can achieve.
Applying a marketing diet to your current strategies is a great way to reset, reevaluate, and grow.
As we see with our clients all too often, taking on too many marketing initiatives without a clear goal and proper tracking is a recipe for disaster. By employing a marketing diet and sticking to it, you’ll find out what is really getting you the results you’re looking for and help you allocate your budget most effectively.
Are you ready to apply an elimination diet to your marketing plan? Start with your website! Download our free Website Conversion Optimization Checklist and use it to make simple changes to your website to transform your visitors into customers practically overnight!
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