Questions to Ask When Your Marketing Isn't Working

Your business is born from the best intentions, but without proper marketing execution, your momentum can stall when growth matters most. While marketing agencies handle 20 to 30 brands at the same time, social media marketing consultant your team and your business don't have the time to glean this kind of insight before turning things around.For that reason, it is more important than ever to reflect upon and improve your marketing practices when numbers are underwhelming. Ask the right questions about your process, execution, audience and market, and your team can turn those down times into an opportunity for long-term growth.Not yet at least. Google's massive video platform boasted some 4 billion daily video views back in 2012. It’s unclear how many more views YouTube racks up each day today, but we do know more than 1 billion unique users descend upon the Internet’s third most popular website each month.Will Facebook, now 1.3 billion monthly active users strong, build up enough video muscle to lure a significant number of eyeballs (and advertisers) away from YouTube? We’ll have to wait and see.I grew up in a rural Nevada town surrounded by barbed wire fences and farm fields stacked with bales of alfalfa. A sprawling livestock auction yard sat behind the pizza joint where I worked. Its most popular menu item was appropriately dubbed Barn Wedges.Oh, and you better believe that country music was a staple of my environment. And yet, an organization that thrust the genre into mainstream America and became a crown jewel of country culture, completely skipped my notice until recently. Starting in the 1920s the Grand Ole Opry showcased performers who were broadcast on radio. social media marketing ideas Through the decades performers have included Hank Williams, Elvis Presley, Dolly Parton and more recently Brad Paisley, Rascal Flatts, Dierks Bentley and Blake Shelton. With its 90th anniversary on the horizon, Grand Ole Opry is staking a comeback using the digital landscape to touch millennials and generations with a newfound interest in country music.

Are we promoting on the right channels?

Interesting content is one of the top three reasons why users take the time to follow brands on social media. This is great news, if you fulfill two important criteria. The first is publishing interesting content,social media marketing packages and the second is putting that content in front of the eyes that might find it interesting.This second factor is easy to overlook. In fact, 36 percent of marketers say they can't accurately attribute conversion to the correct marketing channel, leading to misplaced resources and frustrated teams.While social media has reached a level of ubiquity, communities and topics demonstrate preferences for particular social channels. Monitor social traffic across all platforms and identify which network sees the greatest sharing/interaction per post. Focusing a disproportionate amount of time and resources on the wrong channels can lead to decreased return on investment and untapped potential on other networks.I first encountered Grand Ole Opry because my 17-year-old sister posted a slew of photos to Instagram holding a CD. I was first shocked to see that she owned a tangible music medium, but her hashtag and the plethora of comments and "likes" prompted me to dig further.Turns out, by taking a photo with an album with the hashtag MyRoadBetween she was entering a contest hosted by Grand Ole Opry. Hashtags, brands and contests are commonplace. But a contemporary concept adopted by organization with little to no recognition among the core demographic participating in said contest struck me. The Pew Research Center has reported that 91 percent of teenagers on Instagram post “selfies.” If this many teens are posting photos of themselves to social media and with Instagram and Twitter near the top of their favorite social networks, social media marketing proposal according to Piper Jaffrey, Grand Ole Opry struck gold with its strategy. Further inspection revealed that there were scores of submissions, and a separate contest called for Instagram videos, too. (The contest was conducted on multiple platforms and Grand Ole Opry was able to aggregate the content and track it by using software of Offerpop, a client of my firm.)

Are we listening to our audience?

At its core, media is about forming a relationship with the viewer. In this relationship, the media provider delivers value to the user in the form of information, entertainment or even simply distraction. social media marketing for dummies The viewer then returns the favor with feedback in the form of traffic, comments and social activities.Thanks to modern analytics, however, this relationship goes even deeper. Traffic, behavior metrics and demographic information all help to paint a more robust picture of audience preference and interest. By looking at raw data and connecting the dots between statistics and user behavior, it is possible to develop content that earns traffic by anticipating and meeting reader interests.The real question is, are you listening? According to the Aberdeen Group, only 27 percent of business-to-business marketers say they are effectively tracking content-utilization metrics. Audit your idea generation and publishing process. Are you soliciting and incorporating reader feedback in a systemic manner? If you are not, look at analytics, social-media interactions and industry trends to better understand what your audience wants. Make this data collection and implementation part of your everyday execution and you are likely to see increased traffic as a result.The key to Grand Ole Opry’s success was not just harnessing a timely trend but tailoring the campaign to appeal to a younger audience. Most marketing experts will advise companies to harness social data and build campaigns appealing to their core audience. But Grand Ole Opry accomplished more than gathering a trunk full of user-generated content and great metrics. social media marketing definition The organization embedded its brand into the lives and networks of a generation of fans that can carry them into the future. Talk about "social security."Inbound marketing involves a lot of details. From subheadings, SEO keywords, to simple sentence structure, it can be difficult to determine exactly what makes content “great.” However, for Pulizzi, the answer is simple: “great” content makes people act.