4 Things Causing Blind Spots in Your Marketing Strategy

If you don’t keep pace with marketing advancements, the worry is your brand will fall behind. But take care not to let speed make you susceptible to these blind spots.

A blind spot is something obstructed from full view.

In some cases, blind spots aren’t a big deal. Like if you’re sitting on a park bench, and miss a squirrel playing in a tree because a lamp post blocks your view. Sure, it would’ve been cute to see, but it’s not going to negatively impact you.

Blind spots are problematic when you’re careening towards a specific destination with little control or care. Think of a racecar driver barreling down a track. If they’re unfamiliar with the track, a sharp turn hidden around a bend could be a shock, leaving them with little to no time to safely respond.

When one is unaware of a blind spot or unwilling to safely approach it, it could spell danger.

Let’s look at the most common blind spots marketers are missing by naming the barriers that cause them, plus why it may be more prudent to take your time with some of these matters.

Barrier 1. User Acquisition Over Retention

It makes sense why marketers would want to have a steady stream of new users flooding into the business. A larger user base should mean more money year over year.

The problem with this is that current users don’t always remain current users. When you lose sight of user attrition rates, that user acquisition number realistically isn’t as valuable to your bottom line as it seems.

For starters, let’s say you tend to lose 25 customers for every 100 you bring in. Sure, you increase your user base by 75. However, those users are new to the fold and they don’t owe your brand any loyalty (which is so hard to come by these days).

What’s more, those 25 you lost were likely much bigger spenders than the average new user you acquire. Their lifetime value was also much higher than your new users as well. That’s typically how it goes.

According to Smile.io, the likelihood of a customer making a repeat purchase from a brand goes up with each purchase:

• After one purchase, there’s a 27% chance they’ll come back.
• After two purchases, there’s a 49% chance.
• After three purchases, there’s a 62% chance.

It’s not only the money flowing out of users’ wallets into yours that increases their value. You also have to factor in how much it costs you to acquire versus retain users.

According to SimplicityDX, it costs brands, on average, $29 to acquire just one new user. Return customers, on average, bring in $39 per purchase.

It’s only natural to want to focus on acquiring new users. New users should mean more money—and it will, for a time. However, if you lose sight of the users you already have, your profit margins will drop. It’ll also require much more time and effort to manage your marketing campaigns as you constantly chase new supply instead of fostering what you have.

Barrier 2. Vanity Metrics Obscure User Motivation

Your marketing data tells a story. But the story that some marketers focus on is, “Lots of likes and impressions mean our customers love us.”

Here’s the problem with this: Vanity metrics like likes and impressions can tell you a little bit about what’s happening. You obviously don’t want to put content out into the world for no one to see it. However, if views and engagement come from people who could never be your users or have no impact on your conversion rate, then they’re useless.

As marketers, it’s your job to dig deeper—to figure out why certain parts of your strategies work better than others. But it has to go beyond, “Monday morning Instagram reels are the most popular” or “Blog posts about free resources and apps get clicked the most.”

The “why” can only be answered once you understand what motivates your users.

This is why marketing teams perform various kinds of user research and testing. While you can guess at who your target users are and what makes them tick, you won’t truly know until you speak to them directly.

Marketers can’t afford to play the guessing game when it comes to developing strategies and analyzing the resulting data. If you want to understand the numbers you’re looking at, you have to know why they are the way they are. Well-defined user personas and journeys will help you learn about their motivations so you can craft more effective content over time.

Barrier 3. External Sources Drive Change

While the marketing tactics used from brand to brand may be similar, that’s not necessarily the case with the strategies behind them.

So, let’s say you’re running a holistic products ecommerce shop. There are a few bigger brands you follow in this space and notice that they’ve all added AI chatbots to their sites. It seemed to happen overnight. One day their sites run similarly to yours, now they’re all outsourcing customer support (initially, anyway) to artificial intelligence.

What do you do?

One marketer might see this and think the wise decision is to jump on the bandwagon. They reach out to their web developer and get them to implement an AI chatbot of their own. The developer asks about which software to use and how the chatbot should work. The marketer has no idea, so they point them to the competitor site and tell them to set up something similar.

Another marketer might see this and wonder if it’s worthwhile. Rather than panic about being left behind and rush to add a chatbot, they look over their user data.

• Have they had discussions about AI use with them?
• What are their thoughts on automation?
• Could this improve or streamline the existing customer support process, as their users’ perceive it?
• Would the use of AI conflict with the brand’s values?

Once they’ve weighed the pros and cons, they decide that it is worth pursuing. But first they need to weigh the pros and cons of each chatbot app, also making sure it integrates with their CMS. And then they need to come up with scenarios, prompts and so on to give to the developer to program it.

Looking outward to see what’s happening in marketing (especially with the competition or market leaders) isn’t a bad thing. Problems arise when significant changes are made in haste simply because others are doing them. If you haven’t considered all the facts in front of you or what obstacles may lie ahead, it can end up costing you.

Barrier 4. The Goal Is to Generate More, Not Better Content

When creating a strategy and schedule for your marketing channels, how often do you look backwards, if at all?

It might seem counterintuitive. New content is what moves the needle forward in your business, right? In part, yes.

Whether you’re publishing new content to your website, writing posts on social media daily, or scheduling regular newsletters, you’re sending out signals.

Search engines see this new content and recognize that your organization is alive and well and aiming to stay relevant. New content also keeps your brand top-of-mind with visitors, users and subscribers. In return, it increases your brand’s visibility and opportunities to engage.

Creating new content is important. But what does that mean for everything you created in the past? Is it just there to add bulk to your website and social media accounts? To show how much effort you’ve put into marketing and nothing else?

Your older content has a ton of value.

For starters, content can always be repurposed into other formats. If your team is struggling to come up with new ideas about what to write or create, look at your older content and devise ways to give it new life. Turn a report into an infographic or a webinar into a highlight reel for Facebook, for instance.

Secondly, your social media feeds and newsletters can have new and old content in them. It’s not as though that super popular blog post or case study from last year won’t still be interesting to your target audience. What’s more, bringing it to the front of the line again will give new followers and subscribers a chance to see it.

Lastly, older content has a greater likelihood of ranking higher in search results. But it doesn’t happen because of sheer age alone.

Older content that’s well cared for and continually optimized will serve you well over time. To reap these benefits, marketers should:

• Keep track of all their content, so they know what’s been written about or covered before.
• Fix broken links or outdated references.
• Update the post for accuracy and relevancy.
• Re-optimize it for the latest SEO trends.
• A/B test alternative formats.

When scheduling social media posts and newsletters, add your older content into circulation. Also, encourage your writers and editors to incorporate internal links into their content. This not only helps visitors and readers discover older content, it allows your newer content to borrow some of that older “link juice” for ranking purposes.

Wrapping Up

Marketing moves fast. It’s easy to develop a sort of tunnel vision and end up with blind spots in your vision as you try to stay ahead of everything and everyone.

While adaptation and innovation is crucial in marketing, it shouldn’t be done on a whim or because other people are doing it. Instead, commit to a clear and structured approach in terms of:

• Goal setting
• Project management and process
• Marketing strategy
• Visual and written brand guidelines
• User research and feedback
• Analytics, review and optimization

Let this structure guide your marketing strategy. As you notice changes in trends, technologies, channels and other approaches to marketing, take your time to study them first. Then decide if they’re worth bringing into the fold. If they are, take a measured and incremental approach to implementing the changes so they can help keep you moving forward.