One of the biggest worries of any business owner is to be seemingly doing the right things, and not getting results that match up.
As a business owner, going days or weeks without making any sales can be quite frustrating. But, there’s a chance that the reason why this may be happening is as a result of something you’re not doing quite well.
In this blog post, we’ll be highlighting 7 reasons why no one may be buying from your business and how to fix it.
- They don’t know about you
The number 1 reason why no one is buying from your business just might be that they don’t know you exist. As an online business, or even an offline one, gone are the days when only 1 business might be servicing an entire area. On Instagram alone, there are over 200 million active business accounts. A good number of them sell the same things that you do.
If you aren’t investing in paid marketing, then your target audience might never find out about you and make a purchase. While organic marketing is great (posting regularly on social media what you offer, or a WhatsApp status), paid marketing works faster and gets you sales.
What’s your marketing budget for this month?
Have you set up an ads funnel?
Have you created the content you’ll use for ads?
If people will buy from your business, then they have to know about it. Create a budget to help with marketing this year.
- You’re marketing to the wrong audience
Yes, you might be running ads. You might even have worked with an influencer for your business before. But there are still no changes. Check it. You just might be selling to the wrong audience.
When setting up your ads, or choosing a creator to work with, you need to check for your demography. Your demography in ADs manager contains your audience set-up such as information about where they live, age range, sex, interests etc.
This is why setting up a user and buyer persona for your business is important. It will help you know exactly who your target customers are and how to reach them. This persona will also affect the kind of content you put out and how you interact with your audience.
If you’ve ever watched a diaper ad before, you’ll notice that the ad is directed at parents, not the baby. They sell the idea to the parents that if they get this brand of diapers, their child’s skin will look this way, or they’ll sleep through the night. They’re selling to the right audience even though it’s the baby that will use it. In this case, the buyer persona a diapers vendor will set up is to reach the parents, not the baby.
Defining your target audience will help you devise a better strategy to reach them. If your target audience is other businesses if you’re in the B2B space, then Snapchat advertisements might not convert well for you. If your target audience is university students, but your ad settings are set to ages between 25-31, it won’t convert. If you sell luxury or designer goods, your target audience should be high-income earners, not university students.
Defining your correct target audience is necessary if you’ll make sales from your marketing efforts.
- Poor Products Quality
This is extremely important to look into, especially if you’ve noticed a low customer return rate. A reason no one might be buying from you is because your product quality is quite low. Or even if it might not be, the angles you share your product images from, or the packaging and manner you present the product can come across as shabby.
No one wants to buy food from a food business whose social media is void of colour. Food is colourful, and highlighting that is the best way to sell it. If you have to learn more about photo editing to make your food content pictures look better, then do so.
If it’s a matter of quality, get feedback on what can be done better and make those changes.
- You’re selling to everyone
Everybody cannot be your target audience. The full scope of everybody means you’re talking about the grandma in your village, to the child in primary 2. Selling to everybody is akin to selling to the wrong audience. Just like in point 2, determine and describe who your target audience is.
Doing this will help you create marketing content that will resonate with them and convert them into sales for you.
- They don’t trust you
The world of online shopping is riddled with scams and multiple what I ordered vs. what I got; hence many people are sceptical about buying things online. The biggest way to solve this issue is to continually share reviews to help you build trust with your audience.
If you don’t have reviews from a paid audience yet, you can reach out to friends who have used your product to help you make a review that you can share. If your business is in an industry like food, filming tasting videos where people react well to tasting your meal can help you build trust with your audience because they trust that the people in the video are genuinely enjoying your meal.
Another way to build brand trust is to cross-promote with another business that has a similar audience to yours. Find out more about cross-promotion HERE.
- Selling to too few people.
Another reason why no one is buying from your business is that you’re selling to too few people. Only about 10% of the people you advertise to will buy from you. It’s not bad luck, it’s just a marketing fact. So, if you’re looking to sell 50 products, you should spread your marketing nest to cover at least 500 people. In cases where you’re getting as few as just 10 inquiries, you might just end up selling 1 or nothing. So, if people will buy from you, reach a wide number via marketing and then sell.
- Your sales process is slow or broken
Another reason why people might not buy from you is that your sales process or funnel is broken. One thing many business owners might not know is that some messaging settings on Instagram can prevent non-followers from sending a DM. In cases where you run ADS, and someone gets interested, if this setting is on for your business page, all efforts to send a message might not work, and you can’t guarantee that they’ll leave a comment asking you to DM. Review your social media message settings to ensure that your DMs are wide open for people to make enquiries or purchases.
If you own a business website, make it a tradition to open your website at least once every day and walk through the process via mobile and PC to ensure that there are no hitches in the process. Make it easy for customers to buy and pay you. Whatever method you use to receive orders or make sales, ensure that it works efficiently and quickly.
These are some of the reasons why you might not be making any sales. Review your businesses’ marketing strategies and sales funnels to ensure you’re putting in the best efforts to gain the best results.
READ – 5 SALES STRATEGIES TO HELP YOU SELL MORE IN 2023