Marketers aren’t immune to blind spots or oversights in their strategies and spending. Even the largest and most successful companies get bogged down by minor details, rusty tactics, and messy data.
*Updated 7/24/2024
The most important thing you can do to fix your marketing mistakes is to identify them. After all, if you don’t know what needs fixing, you won’t be able to fix it.
In this article, we’ll identify the nine most common marketing blind spots for you and explain what you can do to fix them.
Your customers don’t just magically appear—they follow a path from discovery to purchase. Without definitively knowing how they find you, you risk spending effort and money on the wrong channels and targeting the wrong set of audiences.
You’ll need to track your customers’ journeys through multi-channel or cross-device tracking.
Attaching UTM parameters to your URLs can help you parse which specific channel or campaign led customers to your website, i.e. organic social, paid social, email, etc. You can track customer paths and UTMs for free with Google Analytics.
In addition to knowing how customers find you, it’s important to understand the driving factors behind why they make a purchase.
What, ultimately, drove their decision to buy? Why did they choose you over a competitor? Understanding their motivations will help you adjust your messaging to better resonate with prospects and aid conversion.
If you don’t know why your customers are buying from you, the best way to find out is to ask them directly. You can survey your customers via phone, email, or social media. Then, you can fine-tune your strategies based on the results.
This could be useful if you lost your phone, are worried about someone’s location, or want to find out more about a person’s whereabouts.
The phone number tracking comes with powerful functionalities designed to track phone numbers, including GPS tracking, cell tower triangulation, and Wi-Fi signal strength among others.
It can be easy to forget that there’s so much more to marketing than just digital marketing.
By focusing solely on the web, email, and social media efforts, you could be missing out on other opportunities to connect with customers and losing them to your competitors.
For example, over 60% of customers who call you will hang up in less than 40 seconds and call a competitor when waiting for silence or music, and caller abandonment accounts for as much as 40% of lost yearly revenue.
Offline channels include things like radio, TV, podcasts, telemarketing, newspapers, and magazines, direct mailers, or OOH opportunities like billboards or poster templates. Depending on your target audience, you could try reaching them on their favorite podcast or a billboard on their daily commute.
For your business phone service, you can implement a professional auto attendant to greet callers and create a positive first impression for your brand. Doing so can help you build trust as well as a more positive customer experience to stand out amongst competing businesses.
Track the success of your offline marketing by deploying a specific discount code, URL, or QR code to separate your offline and online data. Omnichannel customers have been shown to have a 30% higher lifetime value than those who only use digital channels.
If you’re not running A/B or split tests on your marketing campaigns, you could be missing out on higher open rates, click-through rates, and more revenue.
Running tests allows you to tweak your efforts to maximize conversion, reduce your bounce rates, and minimize the risks that come with rolling out new changes.
To run a test effectively, you can only change one element of your campaign, like changing the caption or an email subject line. You also need to be sure that you run your tests at the same times of day to eliminate further variables. Changing too many elements will lead to inconclusive results.
Digital platforms and algorithms change over time, and so should your strategy. Using the same or outdated tactics time and time again can be hurting your business’s profitability.
Ask yourself: is my company using this strategy because it’s the most effective way to drive traffic or leads based on the current landscape, or are we using it because we’ve fallen into the habit of using it without exploring more up-to-date ideas?
Take the time to read the latest news and updates about the marketing channels you’re using. Read industry blogs, listen to podcasts, watch YouTube videos, or subscribe to email newsletters to ensure you stay in the know.
Your prospects likely fall into more than one group—whether that’s different ages, pain points, or funnel entry points. Addressing these prospects the same way may drive up your acquisition costs and give your brand an impersonal or even robotic feel.
Personalized marketing has transformed from a nice-to-have to a must-have, with 52% of customers expecting personalized offers and 80% being more likely to make a purchase after receiving personalized comms.
A customer relationship management tool (CRM) can be a huge help when it comes to personalization.
A CRM serves as a customer database and can not only help you track customer data, but it can also help you segment them into groups and send personalized emails en masse.
It’s important to make sure your CRM integrates with your helpdesk software as well as all major marketing tools your company uses to communicate with existing and prospective customers so that marketing, sales, and customer service teams are in sync.
How your leads contact you and interact with you can greatly impact your closing rates. Focusing on converting cooler leads rather than hotter ones means you might be working harder only to get a worse return on investment.
For example, phone leads are 10-15 times more likely to convert than email leads.
Someone who takes the time to call your business and speak with a representative is more likely to be lower in the funnel and ready to decide on someone who signs up for an email newsletter. Phone and chat leads provide your business with a captive audience.
Distinguishing the source of your leads will help you better determine which ones to prioritize. You can use call tracking software to give you insight into each caller’s specific journey.
The software generates a random, customized phone number on your web page so that when a user calls in using that number, you’ll have data on which web pages they visited, and which marketing campaigns they clicked on.
You also might log email, phone, web, and brick-and-mortar leads separately, but it’s also likely that your leads interact with more than one channel.
That’s where using software to track and store all lead interactions in one central location will serve you well—knowing more about each lead’s path to you will help you figure out which ones to work with.
Collecting data is largely a good thing. However, getting too granular may get in the way of understanding what matters when it comes to your marketing.
Instead of tracking every possible metric, determine what the key performance indicators are (emphasis on the word “key”). These can be as simple as engagement rates or how many users reach a certain landing page.
Doing so will provide clarity on whether your marketing endeavors are a success, a failure, or somewhere in between. This will help you make smarter business decisions for your bottom line.
Your website is undoubtedly a critical tool in your marketing strategy.
While it may do a lot of heavy lifting in terms of communicating your value propositions, providing education and resources, and giving customers opportunities to buy, relying on it too much is not a smart long-term strategy.
Not only can websites be severely impacted by algorithm changes from major search engines, but they’re simply not the end-all-be-all in terms of your customer’s journey.
It’s important to remember that your customers do more than just visit your website to learn about you. They might talk to friends, interact with you on social media, by email, or over the phone, or read about you in a trade publication.
All of these different touchpoints matter and should play a part in your team’s strategy conversations and decision-making.
As a marketer, it’s not hard to get caught up in old habits or small details.
By continuously testing, innovating, and personalizing your communications, you’ll be able to build better relationships and drive sales more effectively.
Understanding your entire customer journey from start to end is crucial to being able to refine your efforts to maximize success.
Meenakshi Nautiyal aka Meenz is a Growth Marketer for Nextiva. She's passionate about everything SaaS, Startups, and SEO. She has a successful track record of 10+ years scaling organic traffic and inbound leads for various startups. Bibliophile and coffee-lover who dives into art therapy during her free time.