Online marketing is something that if you have a website, you will want to get right. The days of having a site and the traffic just coming to you with no effort are well and truly over (if they were every really here for most of us) and it is now up to you to drive traffic and then also make sure this traffic converts into something meaningful and hopefully financial via a successful and cost effective online marketing campaign.

Via the use of Google Ads, Bing Ads, Facebook Adverts, Twitter Ads and all the other elements of online marketing, business owners have so many more avenues to spend their money through now than ever before, with even the relatively newcomer Pinterest also offer paid advertising, as any powerful website platform realises that if they have the right traffic for you, they can charge you to make sure it ends up on your site.

But, getting an online marketing campaign to work is a challenge for many business owners, so we take a look at 7 reasons why your campaign might not be working and also what you can do to turn it around.

Inadequate Planning – At times, most firms can be guilty of just getting something live to generate immediate business, thinking that any marketing campaign is better than nothing. Sadly, a rushed campaign is often the worst thing you can do, because without the planning and strategy that goes into something that is going to be successful, you are not going to get the best returns. From a small Facebook campaign through to a massive content campaign, you need to sit back and work out what you are going to do, how you are going to do it, dates, milestones and the campaign elements needed, before you even think about going live.

Insufficient Budget – Successful online marketing requires a budget, there is no question there, but when it comes to how much you have to spend you have to be realistic about where you spend it as you simply cannot afford to do everything in one go if you are on a very tight budget. You have to spend money to get results, whether it is with Facebook or Google Ads, but trying to split a budget between many elements as you want to do everything is pointless and will lead to poor (if any) results. If budget is an issue then try to concentrate on less elements but spend more on these and then monitor conversions, because if you can find out what works and what does not, you can be more savvy with your money and therefore get more results from your spend, no matter how much that may be.

Lack Of Monitoring – Set up, turn on, walk away and then look at the results when it’s all over – if this sounds like how you run your campaigns, then success is so far off you need to really start thinking again about how you manage things. Although not a daily task necessarily, it is critical you monitor your campaign over the course that it is set to run, and although you may feel it is unfair to judge a campaign until it is over, only by monitoring and possibly tweaking can you change the destiny and the outcome of the campaign. As we talk about below, online marketing is pretty unique when it comes to changes, because you are not really committed so much that you cannot change things, especially in the case of Pay Per Click, so make sure you work for your campaign, rather than expecting it to work for you.

Leave Alone Approach – Unlike most tradition marketing methods, like print or mailshots, online marketing offers you the chance to change things as you go, which is critical when it comes to success. If something is not working, try something else, don’t just assume that you have a committed budget and therefore you need to see it all through to the end. Whilst you should always give things the chance to work and not just pull the plug after a few hours, you are also in complete control and need to make the correct decisions periodically throughout the campaign to get the most from it. For example, if your main page is not converting from your Adwords campaign, then introduce a couple of landing pages and see if you can increase conversion, as you can tweak, amend and ultimately change the course of any online marketing campaign and therefore, you need to!

Wrong Marketing Avenues – When it comes to the avenues for your marketing, there is no one glove fits all approach and whilst you might think you need to do a bit of everything, quite often, this is not the case in terms of a long term approach. Whilst I would always advocate giving something a go (but monitoring how successful it was), I would always say that not everything is going to work for you so it makes sense to concentrate on the areas that are effective and spend more time and effort getting more from these. For some, it might be that Google Ads always generates more conversions than anything else, which means that whilst you should still make some kind of an effort elsewhere, it also makes sense to keep working Google Ads hard, as if it works, you can probably get more out of it. You simply do not have to do everything, but you do have to work with the online marketing outlets that get you the most conversions for the most cost effective price.

Poor End Point – So, you have the best content, you have amazing graphics, you have a campaign that is really getting the interest of people, but when they land on your site they are just not converting because you have put so much effort into trying to get them there, you failed to think about what they will do when they get there! This is often the biggest reason why campaigns do not work, because you have set the expectations really high with a stunning campaign, but the end point does not match this. You need to make sure that when your potential customers hit your website, there is enough to make them convert, whether it’s through landing pages, special offers or some kind of reason to get them to pass over what you want them to.

The Wrong Material – Getting the right kind of campaign material is crucial if you want success, as the kind of creative material you will use for your campaign will be a massive part of it either working or failing, so getting it right in the first place is a must. Are you going to go down the content route and write some excellent and socially loved content or are you going to go for an infographic that really gets to the heart of something? You need to make sure the content and material that you produce is simply fantastic, because the Internet is crammed full of half-hearted articles and blogs that provide nothing, so produce something magical and just watch how it makes your campaign fly.

Although it is fair to say there will probably be many other reasons why success has not yet arrived, some very specific to you, these are often the most common elements that we see when looking at previous marketing campaigns with clients that we meet to try to analyse what went wrong and more importantly, what we can do to help them get it right. Every marketing plan, offline or online needs planning, management and end analysis, otherwise you are not going to get the most from your efforts, which is why it is as important to look at what wrong, as what went right, as with online marketing you will always get another chance if you have the budget.