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Your marketing is ticking along, delivering results and earning a solid ROI.
Then, suddenly, it isn’t.
What went wrong? How can you get back on track?
The simple explanation is that you’ve hit a plateau. You were climbing, and now you’re on the flat. If you want your business to grow, you must find a new path to follow.
The good news is that once you identify where your business has plateaued, you can take simple steps to correct the situation.
Mapping Your Plateau
You know your business isn’t growing, but do you know why? That’s the first step to determining the way forward (and off that plateau.)
Businesses can plateau in several ways. Here are some of the most common:
- Audience Engagement
- Web Traffic
- New Customer Acquisition
- Lead Generation
- Conversion
- Overall Marketing
If you’re already tracking your marketing results you probably know where your performance is falling short. If you’re not, now is the time to start.
You may want to use a marketing platform to set up tracked links. Alternatively, you can use Google Analytics and some social tracking, like a Facebook pixel, to evaluate your current marketing efforts.
Try to narrow down the results and home in on your problem areas. If your website traffic is strong but social engagement is down, you can focus your attention on that area to improve your results.
Audience Engagement
If you’re getting fewer blog comments, social media shares, and phone calls, then your audience engagement could use a boost. Here are some suggestions.
- Make use of your email list by sending a monthly newsletter or a new series of emails. By sharing valuable information and tips with your audience, you can increase engagement and establish yourself as an authority.
- Share content regularly on social media. For example, you might share your blog posts, curate relevant articles from industry publications, and post special offers for your followers.
- Always include relevant hashtags and a call to action to encourage audience participation. It might sound obvious, but your followers won’t know what you want them to do unless you ask them to do it.
Regular posting is the key to increasing engagement. You can’t ignore your social media and expect people to click, comment, and share.
Website Traffic
Your evaluation of your marketing stats reveals that traffic to your website has taken a dip. What can you do to get things moving again?
- Do a full audit of your website and identify areas for improvement. For example, you might want to do an SEO refresh and make sure that each page is optimized for one keyword.
- Speaking of keywords, make sure to use them in your page titles, headlines, and subheadings, as well as in image tags for the best results.
- Increase your blogging frequency and promote your blog posts on social media.
- Double check your information for accuracy and relevancy.
Your website can do a lot to attract traffic, but you’ll need to update it periodically to maintain a high level of visibility.
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New Customer Acquisition
Perhaps the issue you’ve identified is that your new customer acquisition has slowed down. If that’s the case, try doing these things to attract new customers:
- Review your online listings and make sure they’re identical. Many local businesses have more listings than they realize and if they’re not standardized, it can dilute your online profile.
- Add your location to your Facebook profile to help customers search for you.
- Start a customer referral program to incentivize your current customers to bring in their friends and family.
- Partner with other local businesses to host local events – and create unique local hashtags to use on social media to promote it.
Each one of these things can help new people find your website and social media pages, as well as coming into your store.
Lead Generation
Does your business rely on having a steady stream of qualified leads? If so, then having your lead generation hit a plateau can be a real problem. Here are some suggestions to help you counter the slowdown:
- Create an irresistible lead magnet to entice people to give you their email addresses. For example, you might create a cheat sheet, a template, or a short eBook to give away to new leads. Make sure to create a dedicated landing page for your offer.
- Use targeted campaigns and personal interaction to engage people on social media. The more targeted you are with your social media marketing, the more leads you will be able to attract.
- Put a call to action on every page of your website – not just on the pages that you use to promote offers. You should always ask visitors to fill out a contact form or sign up for a mailing list.
The key here is to attract leads who are interested in what you have to offer. Once they’re on your mailing list, you can work your magic to convert them into paying customers.
Conversion
Maybe you have plenty of leads and clicks, but the traffic you attract isn’t converting. How can you fix it? Here are some tips.
- Add customer testimonials (video testimonials are especially effective) to your website.
- Encourage customers to leave reviews on sites like Yelp, Google, and Facebook – and make sure to be responsive to positive and negative reviews.
- Update the wording, images, and calls to action on your ads and landing pages.
- If you haven’t already done so, create special landing pages for each of your offers.
These suggestions can help you overcome potential objections and increase your conversion rate.
Don’t Let Your Plateau Stop You…
Even professional marketers get it wrong sometimes. That’s to be expected – so you shouldn’t be discouraged if you hit a plateau. Take a step back, evaluate your results, and then take practical steps like the ones suggested here to get your business moving again.