Marketing Not Working? 3 Signs You Need to Fix Your Branding First.

A challenge nearly every business suffers from is not enough sales and poor performing marketing activities. Companies that master their marketing and sales have the momentum to increase revenues, profits, new product development, and expand their team.

Many problems that business owners think of as marketing problems are signs that you have a branding problem.

If you haven’t clarified your market position, making your differentiators clear to your prospects isn’t easy. If you don’t have a consistent visual identity, you need extra touchpoints to build brand recognition. 

Taking time to clarify and formalize your brand—including your visual style, tone of voice, and critical messages—is crucial to making your marketing more effective.

3 signs that your marketing problems are branding problems.

1. Poor landing page conversions on your PPC campaigns

In a pay-per-click campaign, there are many steps along the way from search to sale. If you feel confident that you have the right keywords and get traffic to your landing page, but you are not making sales, then the problem is with the landing page.

In this case, you’ve gotten all the marketing tactics right: you’ve set up a campaign focused on the right audience, you’ve discovered relevant keywords, and you’ve bid successfully. But you won’t see final conversions if your brand message doesn’t make sense.

Landing pages are like micro versions of your brand. Every weakness in your brand gets amplified when you focus it on a landing page.

If your message isn’t connecting to your audience: no clicks.

If the visual design looks unprofessional: no clicks.

If you don’t appear to be trustworthy: definitely no clicks.

Getting clear on just the right benefits to focus on and saying that clearly, succinctly, and emotionally are essential elements of compelling landing page copy. Then, putting it into a professionally designed web page will lead to a high converting landing page.

2. Your sales cycle is too long

It takes time to move a prospect through your funnel and make a sale, and poor branding will slow down that process. 

Why? It’s most likely because you lack consistency in your branding. 

It takes, on average, anywhere from 3-13 touchpoints before someone is ready to buy. The exact number depends on your industry, what you’re selling, the cost of your product or service, and other factors. 

When you move someone down your marketing funnel, your goal is to push them through the typical phases of knowing me, like me, trust me, and buy from me. 

If every interaction with your brand looks different or feels different, you’re not building up that recognition which is critical to building trust.

Make sure you use consistent colors, images, fonts, and messaging in all of your marketing efforts. It’s like greasing the sides of your funnel!

3. Your e-newsletter has poor open and click-thru rates

E-newsletters are a great way to remind customers and prospects about your business. If they opt into regular emails from you, it’s a clear indication that they are interested in your product or service.

When you’re helpful or inspiring, they want to hear from you. 

But if they sign up and then regularly delete your emails without reading them or without clicking through to buy, read more or take action, then they’ve started to diminish the value of your brand.

Once someone starts doing the auto-delete, getting them hooked again is tough. From the start, make sure every newsletter is well-designed and has valuable content.

E-newsletters are part of building a long, ongoing relationship with your business and your brand. Like everything with branding, focus on consistency, high-quality graphics, and understandable messaging.

Invest in your brand story and visual identity to reduce marketing and sales costs

Unfortunately, many businesses see branding as a one-time expense and an expenditure that they want to keep as low as possible. They are eager to move into revenue-driving activities like marketing campaigns and sales calls.

But, when you skimp on brand development, you end up spending far more than that cost because of the slow, ineffective marketing and sales activities.