5 Critical Warning Signs You Need a New Marketing Approach

Are you marketing your little heart out 24/7 but still hearing crickets when it comes to actual sales? Or maybe your traffic is fine but conversions? Not so much. If you're nodding along, this episode is your wake-up call.

Today, I’m breaking down the 5 biggest signs your marketing strategy is completely broken—and giving you the practical, no-fluff fixes to actually turn things around. Spoiler alert: this is not about working harder; it’s about getting smarter.

We’ll chat about:

✨ Why hustling for every single sale is a red flag
 📉 What’s really going on when your sales are inconsistent AF (yep, I kept it clean for the kiddos)
 🛒 The truth about traffic that doesn’t convert
 💌 Why your customers aren’t coming back (and how to fix it)
 📱 And the biggest one… what to do if your entire biz is relying on social media

This one’s packed with real talk, actionable tips, and plenty of those "oh crap, that’s me!" moments. You are not alone, and there is a better way to run your marketing without burning out.

🎉 PLUS: I’ve got a free webinar coming up that you do not want to miss
It’s called: The Profitable Product Business Roadmap – Your 90-Day Plan to More Sales & Consistent Profit (Without Relying on Social Media)
And yes, it’s as juicy as it sounds. I’ll walk you through exactly how to build a marketing machine that works while you sleep—so you’re not constantly stuck on the content hamster wheel.

👉 Click here to register now or find the link in the show notes below.

Resources & links from the episode:

• Register for the FREE 90-Day Roadmap Webinar
• Related episodes: 
  • [What Should Be in Your Welcome Email Sequence]
  • [How to Build Your Email List for Your Product Biz]

If this episode hit home, do me a little favor and share it with a biz bestie who needs it too! And of course, hit that subscribe button so you never miss a moment.

Let’s go make marketing fun, profitable, and something you actually look forward to again.

xo
 Mel

Courses mentioned in this podcast:

Roadmap To Profit

Nail Your Email Marketing

SEO Booster

Pinterest For Product Businesses

Transcript

 [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to today's episode. My name is Melissa Robbins. I am so excited to bring you some new episodes in here today. 

if you feel like you're marketing 24 seven, but you're still hearing crickets in your store or on your online store, this episode is your wake up call. I'm going to break down the five biggest signs your current marketing strategy is broken and give you simple practical fixes that will actually get your results.

If you're nodding along to this episode, do not miss my free webinar, which is coming up the profitable product business roadmap, your 90 day plan to more sales and consistent profit without relying on social media. The link is in the show notes. Make sure you register for that, 

all right, so let's get into it. sign number one, you are hustling hard for every single sale. You're posting daily, you're offering discounts, you're running giveaways, but it feels like you're pulling teeth. You feel like you need to be on 24 seven to make a sale you rely on promotions and launches to create urgency, but you have zero momentum in between. 

Now why this is happening is because you don't have an automated or evergreen strategy. Working in the [00:01:00] background. You're doing hand to hand combat marketing when you need a scalable machine Okay, so if you haven't already got these things, these are the things you can set up right now to improve the situation. You can set up a welcome sequence for your new email subscribers. Make sure it's between five to seven emails and I've got a whole episode dedicated just to what your welcome sequences should look like.

So go and check that out as well. You should have a monthly promotional calendar so that you're not winging it. in all of my programs and courses, I go through how to do that how to set up a 12 month marketing calendar.

So you're not being just reactive all the time, but you're actually proactive in what you're putting out there and Leaning to other traffic sources. Do you have your SEO strategy set up? Have you got your email marketing to generate? 20 30 percent of your sales.

Do you use Pinterest? Do you use Google? What else you doing and what are some things that we working and attracting the customers who are already searching for something? Your marketing should be a magnet, like draw people to you. It shouldn't be something that you have to shout out like a megaphone every single day to actually get attention.

Number two [00:02:00] is that your sales are inconsistent AF. Now, I don't want to swear there, just in case those kids listen to the episode, but how this shows up in your sales figures, , maybe you hit a record in one month, but then the next month you barely cover your rent.

you don't know what's actually working. Like you're not using your data. You're not understanding what's happening to really dive into what's actually working in your business. You get random website traffic, but it's not predictable. Like it goes up and down. Consistently, and you don't really know where that traffic is coming from either.

You don't really understand what sort of marketing activities are working and what's not or what sales channels are working. You really are inconsistent. And why this is happening is you're relying on spur of the moment , reactive actions.

You're not being proactive about your planning. You're not being proactive about that. You have consistent activities going on in your business over a time period. So it's not just a, Oh, we're really flat right now. Let's do a sale. Oh, let's quick. We need to bring out a new colorway because things aren't working.

 So you clearly don't have a plan in place. So what you need to do [00:03:00] instead.

Number one, we need to look at the data. Where are people actually coming from? What products are converting best? Understand what your best sellers are. Understand what's having the most impact in your business. What are people searching for? What are your Google Analytics tell you that people are hitting your page for?

What reasons are they coming? What reasons are they finding you? What are your best traffic sources? Really understanding those as well. And if it is just one of them, like Instagram, then how can you diversify so it's not all your eggs aren't in that one basket as well. Stop starting from scratch, repurpose content use content again and again. A video that you created three months ago, if you've got that same product, can be reused again. If you've got something that is gone on Instagram, you can use that on your Pinterest. How can you use your product description to then, rework some Google ads that you might have going on as well.

Implement some marketing rhythms, so have a plan and have a strategy, have some email campaigns, not just one off emails going out. Have some content pillars that you're working towards that you tap into [00:04:00] to share about your business. If you can't repeat it, you can't scale it.

we need things in our business that we can repeat because otherwise it is way too hard to scale. Number three, you're getting traffic, but no one's buying.

So you might be actually getting traffic to your website, but your website's not converting. You've got visitors, you've got store reviews, you've got some link clicks, but not the actual cart conversion and money in your bank. You might be wondering if your audience is broken, like maybe it's the algorithm, maybe it's just that people aren't spending money right now, blaming everything on the economy, which look, things are definitely quiet right now compared to what they have been.

however, there are still people who are making sales and I see that there's still people doing really well.

So why is it happening? Why is your website and your messaging and your offers not actually doing the job?

And what the heck can we do about it? All right. So first of all, we need to look at your website. If you're getting the actual traffic to your website and looking at your analytics on your website, making sure that you can see that you have traffic coming there, really look at and [00:05:00] again, review that data.

What are your analytics of your, add to cart look like? there's a difference between when you get people to, you get traffic to your website, are they actually adding to the cart in the first place?

So ideally that number would be between eight and 11%. If you can get. 8 percent of the people who are actually visiting your website to add to cart, that's a starting point. If no one's adding to cart in the first place, then you're never going to get that conversion rate up either. But you need to start there.

What's your add to cart rate? What is the rate of checkout? How many people are dropping off from the add to cart? To then get to checkout, how many people actually converting and that's what ends up with your end conversion rate, which generally would be between one to 3 percent for a e com store, depending on what your product is, depends on what that number looks like for physical retail stores and you've got an online store to that number can often be lower because people are looking at your site before they come into store.

So it's not always a true reflection compared to people who, are e commerce only or have a really [00:06:00] strong e commerce online presence as well.

So knowing your numbers, knowing what your add to cart rate is, like where is the problem? If they're not adding to cart in the first place, maybe the point of conflict is in your homepage.

Maybe if they're actually getting to the product page, what are your product descriptions look like? Are they benefit based and boring as hell? Like that's often the case when I see lots of people, do you have call to actions on your website? How visible are your buttons and clear? Anyone who's seen me speak at trade shows or on one of my webinars has probably seen my contrast checker, which I go on about over and over again, because it's one of my favorite features. Always make sure that you have high contrast in all your graphics.

do you have social proof on your website? Do you have your reviews? Do you make your offer feel urgent? Like why should they buy today? Do you have any of those FOMO or scarcity tactics on your website as well? So don't blame the audience if you're getting traffic to your website, blame your website for not actually converting them in the first place.

Go through and actually practice shopping on your own website and see what barriers you come up with. I was sitting with my friend, the other day and we're [00:07:00] looking on her new website, which is amazing. It's beautiful. But we went on there because we're at a pop up store trying to figure out how to find the marble and how to find the glass.

And we realized that There was no actual easy navigation towards those two things. So what can you do? Go and shop on your own website and figure out like, what is a barrier? What's happening when people go there? Is there something that makes it hard for them to get what they want and find what they want?

Right, so number four, you don't have repeat customers. If your customer return rate is low, and when I say low, it's under 20%, then you are constantly having to find new customers. If every day, every month you are having to find new customers, and depending on what your customer acquisition cost is, right now I dare say it would probably be quite high, depends on how you're actually finding your customers.

If you're doing all the work to get your customers once, and then they never buy from you again, you are wasting money. You really need to work on how you can get customers to come back to you again and again. And if you're not top of mind for that customer when [00:08:00] they, , think of ceramics or when they think of earrings or when they think of a gift, if you're not top of mind, then that's something you need to work on and focus on building into your business.

We want to build a post purchase or retention plan into your business. You've got to make sure you don't just attract that customer, but you nurture them and convert them to be a long term customer. We all want our customers to stay with us for longer. I mean,

Have a think about yourself, how often you buy from a business that you've bought from previously. If they never contact you ever again, how likely are you to buy from them again? I bought something from a market, a skin care range that I love.

It's a beautiful, It's a beautiful moisturizer, but they haven't contacted me again to say, have you run out yet? Like, are you low on stock? Is it time that you replenished like anything? Why am I getting, I get an email from them. I would, if they kept reminding me, I would way more likely to buy from them again.

 hey, it's been six months since you bought your. Our, you know, blah, blah, blah. Moisturizer. are [00:09:00] you missing us? what about that feeling that you had whenever you put that cream on in the morning or whatever it might be?

how can you capture that customer back again and retain that customer for longer? so you really build up that lifetime value that they spend with you as well. So what to do about it? we want to create a post purchase follow up email sequence.

You might even have a complete the set promo or emails going out that are like, you may also like, maybe you have a loyalty program or a subscriber only perks in your business. And email your customers consistently with value, not just sales all the time or not just promos or you only send an email once every six weeks and it's just about a discount that you've got going on.

you've got to nurture those customers and keep yourself top of mind.

Now I've been surrounded by business for many years. And I remember a part of my dad's telling me stories many years ago of how much cheaper it is to keep a customer than to find a new one all the time.

So to really make sure that you build that customer relationship, nurture that customer, go [00:10:00] above and beyond

and be unforgettable because it's way cheaper to keep a customer than to constantly chase new ones all the time. Sign five that your marketing is not working right now. And this is a big one is you're a hundred percent dependent on social media, how this shows up.

You are constantly, you live in reels and you're burnt out.

Your content gets views, but doesn't get sales so if Instagram went down tomorrow, would your business also, that is a sign that you're spending way too much of your time on social media. 

This is a question I posed inside my email challenge. I did a number of. Months ago now, which was how much time do you actually spend on the social media a week? And if you took just one of those hours and you actually allocated that to your email instead How much difference could that make to your business?

How much more income and hand sales could it make to your business? We don't want to have all your eggs in a basket and an algorithm that you cannot control. You can control your email. You can control how often you share. You can control what you put on your website to attract people through SEO.

What you can control is your email list [00:11:00] and you can control building that email list. So it's your number one asset in your business. So I beg of you to make sure that you actually focus on doing that in your business as well. And again, I've got a. whole episode and I'll link these in the show notes on , how to actually build your email subscriber list for your product business. We need to diversify with SEO and Pinterest. They work while you're asleep. I don't really want to have the constant ads that I get fed on Instagram and Facebook.

So I'm spending way more time on Pinterest than what I ever was, and I know as a generation there's a whole lot more of new users coming to Pinterest than what there ever was as well. So it's definitely one of those things that I'm super passionate about. And if the only people seeing your content are the ones that are already following you, then that's not growth, that's a hamster wheel, like where you're constantly just chasing that, quick sale and that quick dopamine hit too.

Okay, so let's go over the five signs. Number one,

you have to constantly hustle for every single sale. Number two, your sales are inconsistent. They fluctuate from month to month. They fluctuate highly from month to month. [00:12:00] Number three is you've actually got visitors, but you don't get buyers. You're not converting. Number four is you don't have repeat customers.

Your customer return rate is under 20 percent and it's a real battle to get that up any higher. Number five is you rely too much on social media for sales.

So if you nodded along to any of these, then it may be time to rework your marketing strategy.

And if you want a step by step plan on how to fix it, you can join my free webinar that I've got coming up, which is your 90 day plan to more sales and consistent profit for your product business without relying on social media or showing up at markets. Please don't spend all your time on markets either.

I love markets. Markets are amazing. I think they're so good for your business, but I don't think that you should spend all your energy and time getting ready for the next market, making for the next market. And then you spend no time own working on your business. So to join my free training, just go to the show notes below