After weeks of planning, strategizing, and creating your marketing campaign, it falls flat after it launches.
Figuring out what went wrong when a marketing campaign flops is a miserable exercise. Yet, it is imperative to ensure you can make the necessary adjustments. Was it in the planning? The strategy? Or the delivery of your campaign?
Here at Credico, we’ve compiled a list of five reasons your marketing campaign may have failed and how to avoid these mistakes the next time.
Targeting the Wrong Audience
“Who is our target customer?” is the first question you must answer before launching any marketing campaign. Your goals must be clear before creating any marketing assets or investing in advertising. Get this answer wrong, and your campaign will fail. It takes a lot of research. You’ll need to discover things like who your product appeals to, what solution your product offers them, and how much competition is in the market – and these answers must be apparent, not guesswork.
Next, dive deeper to know those ideal customers’ interests, buying habits, challenges, and who they consult for purchasing decisions. Knowing your audience in detail will put you in the best possible position to succeed at marketing. Here at Credico UK, we shared in a previous article about how understanding consumer behaviour helps us to decide the best way to present products and services in a way that generates maximum impact on consumers.
Failing to Meet Regulatory or Compliance Guidelines
Marketing compliance guidelines should be taken very seriously, as failing to meet these guidelines can ruin your reputation with your consumers and lead to campaign failure.
Regulations often change, making it challenging for your marketing team to keep on top of them. Implementing a process where these guidelines are reviewed regularly to ensure everyone maintains a basic understanding is essential. Keeping on top of regulatory updates ensures that your marketing campaigns always deliver a clear and honest message that is consistent with your brand.
Not Spending Enough
Businesses often allocate whatever budget they have available rather than strategically observing the market and current ROIs to determine what is required to run a successful marketing campaign. How much should you be spending? Businesses should default to a 5% rule if they do not have enough historical data to allocate a budget confidently. This is a general marketing rule where you spend 5% of your revenue on marketing activities. Be warned, highly competitive industries or consumer product niches may demand more than this. For example, in the ‘service consulting’ industry, the average marketing spend is 12% of turnover.
Small budgets are problematic for three reasons:
- Your budget is too low to build up enough “frequency.”
- You can’t generate enough traffic and leads to see a sale.
- Your ads can’t run for a long enough period.
Barriers to a Great Customer Experience
Sometimes, there are factors outside of your marketing efforts that are responsible for the failure of a campaign. Customer experience is a great example. If you have a difficult online checkout experience or if your sales team doesn’t respond fast enough to leads, these can all be why a marketing campaign doesn’t see the return you expect.
Make sure you fix any customer experience issues before increasing marketing spend.
Lack of Gravitas in Your Brand
The first job of marketing is to grab attention. No one can understand your value if they never see your marketing. Ensure you’re leveraging the best practices of your marketing platforms to make your marketing more visible. This includes using strategies like video on social media that are more noticeable than static images alone.
Human attention is a scarce commodity. Yet when we look at many industries, all brands look the same, sound the same, and often lack clarity through their messaging and creative. Look at the competitive landscape and note all the category “standards,” such as commonly-used colors and messaging. Then figure out which standards to break so your marketing stands out.
For businesses wishing to boost marketing conversion rates and improve customer loyalty, please get in touch with our Business Development team and review our Solutions for more insight into how Credico can partner with you.