Jared Atchison September 15, 2020 If you’re like other business owners, you want to find success. We all dream of creating and operating a thriving company one day, but getting there is a journey. It all starts with your customers and the industry where you work.
Failure to understand how your audience and industry co-exist can have a negative impact on your sales, engagement, and traffic. The key to having a successful business is understanding market gaps or miscommunications between other companies and their customers.
When you look at multi-million dollar businesses, they all have a unique attribute that makes them stand out. In most cases, this trait boils down to their product and how it helps its customers within the industry.
For example, it’s not easy for a new company specializing in CRM software to get up and running with all of the competition in today’s market. These companies have to discover gaps in their competition’s strategy while looking inward for ways to improve.
Today we are going to explore several ways you can identify internal marketing gaps on your website. These tips can help people across all industries. So, if you’re looking to close those gaps and find success, stick around.
Invite Customers to Leave Feedback
The best way to find gaps in your marketing strategy is by asking your customers to leave feedback. Their opinions across all platforms can help you pinpoint problem areas and resolve the issue.
Let’s say you have a business that sells shoes. Your sales are low, and your inbox is full of messages from potential customers. They all say that they like the styles you offer, but you don’t carry your size. You’ve now identified an internal gap between your brand and customers.
The solution to this is to review all of the feedback and determine what size shoes these folks need. They’ve shown a clear interest in your business; now you have to close the gap to complete the sale. You can choose to order specialty pairs for these customers, or buy wholesale and add the product to your store as a permanent fixture.
Additionally, you can learn a lot from on-site surveys. Asking users to leave feedback about their experience on your site can help you find gaps in your web design.
Review Your Website Analytics
Your Google Analytics report can give you a ton of information about your customers, website traffic, and more. Most people think of their analytics as a way to see how they can improve the structure of their website.
But did you know that your analytics account can also help you discover marketing gaps?
So, for example, the average cart abandonment rate is 76%. If you check your reports and notice that one of your sales pages has a 95% abandonment rate, there’s a clear sign that something’s wrong.
You go through and check the page. Everything looks like it’s in order. Except if you look a little deeper, you may find a problem that you didn’t know existed. The abandonment rate is also connected to your newest product. This may be more than a sign of disinterest. It could indicate that you didn’t frame your marketing in a way that solves relevant problems experienced by your audience.
Now you can go back to the drawing board and start thinking about what you’re missing from your copy. Are you not touching on an important feature? If not, you may need to think about how you can change your product in a way that will benefit your users.
While your analytics report can’t always tell you exactly why a gap is there, it can certainly help you discover problems and correct them before you lose sales or more customers. You can streamline this process by adding Google Analytics to your website, which will save you time and energy.
Practice Social Listening
Social listening is a marketing strategy used by businesses to see what customers say about them on platforms like Facebook and Instagram. There are plenty of different reasons you should consider using this tactic to grow your business. But one of the most important benefits you get from social listening is the ability to identify gaps in your marketing strategy.
Customers have no problem expressing their opinions online. When you couple that notion with the fact that over 3 billion people use social media, it’s clear that social listening can help you discover underlying problems.
As an example, let’s assume that you notice the same unusually high cart abandonment rate we talked about earlier. You decide to check your social listening tools to see if you can pick up on what people are saying.
Suddenly, the problem becomes evident.
A majority of people abandoned your page because you didn’t include shipping and fees until the last part of the checkout process. You now know that your customers expect to see the final price while they are browsing. The uncertainty of additional costs can easily drive someone away from your site.
You’ve now managed to identify a gap in your pricing plan. As soon as you fix the problem and let those customers know through a post or direct message, you’re likely to see some of those people come back to complete their order.
Hold Company-Wide Meetings
Finally, you should try to have company-wide meetings at least once a month. When a business has multiple teams, it’s easy to get tunnel vision and overlook seemingly simple success gaps.
Sometimes it takes getting everyone together to talk about the company to discover the obvious. These small sessions are great for brainstorming, but they are also valuable sources of internal feedback and thoughts.
Using the information from these meetings, you can start to plan changes to your business over time. Fix the noticeable issues, and encourage team members to speak up during the next gathering if they notice a gap that hasn’t been previously mentioned.
If you want to find success, you should listen to your team, as well as direct and indirect feedback from your customers. Use the tips we’ve mentioned today to see where you can improve and start making positive changes to your design, structure, and content. You’ll find that the more you participate in activities like surveys and social listening, the more you learn about the key to success — your customers.
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