Social Media: Reasons Behind Low ROI Of Online Campaigns

By Shawn Stevenson

Recently a research for retail sales for South Africa recognized the fact that now nearly 1% of all retail is done through online platforms, it might be a small number currently but it’s bound to get bigger as marketers are pumping more and more money into online advertising and SEO.

Opulence in online advertising has become the norm for nearly all digital or brick and mortar organizations where everyone is vying for a slice in the great game of garnering attention to the brand or product an organization is selling.

But this extravagance has no relevance until the eyeballs result in bottom line positive cash shake ups for the organization and it results in fruitless momentary attention that fails to create the sort of impact that it had to weave.

With mobile phones and smartphones accounting for nearly 61% of the total web traffic in South Africa, it is now highly necessary to create campaigns that make use of this recent phenomenal growth in the online industry.

Your online strategy, whatever strategic concoction it maybe, has to bring in conversions at the end of the day. Online advertising is akin to a funnel that channels most of the attention you gain towards sales and conversions and the rate is lower than normal, then there is a big need to worry.

Digital marketers and advertisers need to understand that there is difference between inciting one’s attention and providing valuable information which is more like irrelevant links in between articles to promote websites with an utter lack of generating usefulness. There is immense need in the South African market for relevant online opportunities but the campaigns are still lagging far behind.

Conversions are not rocket science. Getting attention is necessary but it is just half of the work done and it is utterly useless until it can be tuned to churn out sales. If a big chunk of your opportunities is going unutilized, then you need some tweaking in your strategy to make it work in your favor, here are some reasons why campaigns generate low ROIs and how to make it better:

An annoyed visitor:

At the end of the day, it is the user who is the king and retains the final opinion on whether your product will be bought or not. No matter how exorbitant the campaign is, if the user doesn’t find it piquing its interest, he/she will bounce straight off your website before the conversion process takes place. In this regard, understanding the dynamics of your target market is essential towards ultimately finding a strategy that will take the user to the end of the ride. Data has suggested that an average South African spends nearly 5 hours of the day accessing the internet realm, which is a lot of time, so anything that is good enough will be visited again and conversions will definitely follow.

Check your click line and see where the problem lies which can be found out by analyzing the amount of volume that bounces off after each click in the process. It might be the aesthetics, layout, too low or too high amount of information, irrelevant material and a whole lot of other things working alone or in tandem to repel the user off. Find and correct it.

Too much in the Fray:

South African internet users are on the rise and so is the demand for goods and services online, they are there to choose and your website is there to make this process easier for them but unfortunately a whole lot of websites focus too much on putting just about everything they have on display along with unending text and a whole lot of other flashy advertisements that give it a tackier look that makes the user confused by being bombarded with irrelevant information most of the time.

When talking about aesthetics that initiate, garner and retain attention, minimalism and clarity are two things that should be at the forefront as ecommerce web design Sydney is a lot more about guidance than it is about using it as a tool to put on a lot of information hoping they would act as hooks to latch on to the user.

Not enough focus on call to action:

While there may be a great display of products on your website and the images might be high definition, if the call to action is not primarily in the focus of the user or is too subtle, the interest in the product will not lead to a conversion.

The South African market for online goods and services is not saturated as yet to the extent it is in Europe and North America, which leaves a wide gaping hole in online trade which needs to be catered, your user is to be redirected towards to the area where the transaction can take place easily.

A call to action should be one of the most prominent features on a responsive web page along with easier process to make a purchase possible. A high number of websites require too many details from the visitor ending up irking him/her as consumers do not like to go through a lot.

Instantaneous and speedy processes ensure that the user becomes a customer. Once the call to action is clicked on and the user is now interested, it is now a lead which needs to be transformed into a conversion and your best representative in that manner can only be “Convenience”. Focus on making the call to action easier and less cumbersome, removing as many barriers as you can to make the process easier.

In that manner, the user would go through the process easily and it will translate into more and more conversions for your company enabling you to make full use of your marketing campaigning and strategic marketing and gain a great foothold in the already bludgeoning internet marketplace of South Africa.