There was a solar eclipse this morning, but it is likely you did not notice it. Why? It started at 4:38 a.m. EST and was over by 6:30. If you were not up early, it was over before you got out of bed. For most of the country, the sun did not rise before the event was over. If you live in the eastern most United States, such as Maine, you got an hour and a half view of the eclipse if you got up at 5:00 a.m. If you live in Indiana, as I do, you got a mere 15 minutes. With the path of the moon, only the eastern seaboard states and the upper Midwest were in line for the moon shadow. So it came and it went without many people noticing.

There are some similarities between unseen solar eclipses and marketing – that is, marketing that is not working for you. For instance, if you are getting really good visitor numbers on your website, but it is not translating to actual sales, you may be in a marketing moon shadow. The analytics are not lining up with the bottom line. How can this happen? There are several possibilities. You may be targeting the wrong group. If your web traffic is made up of people who will never buy what you are selling, you need to regroup your marketing efforts to make sure you are zeroing in on the right people. You can do this by more tightly defining the demographics of your target market. Don’t mess with people who you think may buy from you – essentially a good fit for you. Target the people who are a great fit – who need what you are selling.

Another reason you may not be making sales with your marketing has to do with your timing. Some products and services are sold in cycles. You may be out of sequence. For instance, I don’t buy Christmas decorations in July. I tend to buy them between Thanksgiving and the end of the year.

Both of those may be the reason you are not getting sales. However, the most common reason that marketing plans don’t result in sales has to do with a typical marketing mistake: you have not built in any kind of transition from knowing about your brand to being asked to try it. In other words, you have not solicited any action that will result in a sale from your prospective customer. All you have done is made them aware of your brand.

Outside of watching your sales figures, how do you know when you are successfully making the transition from awareness to first-time sales marketing? There are several ways to measure the incremental steps of prospective customers from one phase of marketing to the other. One of the most common is building a multiple step web-based campaign that begins with a landing page. The landing page is used to attract a targeted group to learn about your brand and then entices them to either find out more or to buy the product. If you watch your analytics, you can follow the flow of these prospects. How many bounce off the landing page and how many click through? Where do they click? What is the next page they click? Follow this tree and you will be able to put some science behind your marketing.