Marketing is an essential component of a company’s growth. As it is a continuous activity, the effectiveness of any marketing strategy can be measured over a period of time. Not all marketing strategies can give us the desired results. A failed marketing strategy costs a lot more than money. It can cost us time, resources, and customers. It also negatively impacts sales performance.
While we cannot predict in advance whether a particular marketing strategy will fail or not, we can avoid some common mistakes that’ll help us reduce the risks.
Here is the list of top reasons why marketing campaigns fail – a list collected based on our experience in the digital technology and marketing domain over the past 8 years.
Inadequate planning
No planning is perfect, but it is important to plan enough to cover all the aspects that can have positive and negative effects on marketing activities and results. Inadequate planning leads to chaos, confusion, and delay.
How to avoid this?
If you are planning a marketing campaign that will be run for a minimum of 3 months, it is important to plan all the activities that will be done in that period such as timeline mapping, resource allocation, budget allocation, etc. These activities are important and should be documented in advance.
E.g. Suppose from the second week of your execution, you are planning to start a Facebook Video Views Ad, the relevant team should be informed about the same in advance, so they will keep all the necessary creatives, ad copies, landing pages, and other integrations ready before that ad goes live.
Plan all the activities well in advance, and define the objectives and goals for each team with utmost clarity and specificity so that their work will be focused on getting the desired results.
Inconsistencies
This is most commonly observed in blogs, newsletters, and social media posts. Many companies start these activities with great enthusiasm and energy, but within a month or so, it starts declining. Blogs and social media are powerful tools to engage your customers with the brand. It is important to consistently engage with your current as well as potential customers to increase the brand recall rate. You will never see tangible results within a month or a week. Hence, all marketing activities should be executed consistently.
How to avoid this?
If you are planning to post one blog per week, make sure you have already prepared a minimum of 10 blogs before you start putting the blogs on the internet. This gives you 10 weeks for preparing the next blog. Due to any reason, if you are unable to produce the blog for a week or two, you will still be able to maintain consistency.
Over assuming the knowledge of the customers
We all have seen ads where the companies use technical jargon we know nothing about. Not all potential customers know all the details of the products and services that we offer. This creates confusion and results in lower results.
How to avoid this?
Clarity and specificity are the two most important features of any successful ad campaign. Never over assume the knowledge of the customers.
Keep the language simple while writing the ad copies.
Try to be as specific as possible while communicating the benefits and USPs of your products and services.
Not planning remarketing ads in advance
Not every person who visits your product page has decided on buying the product from you or your competitors at that moment. They may buy immediately, but most probably they will make the purchase decision in a week or so.
It is important to communicate the USPs, testimonials, warranty, and other details to give that person enough reasons to buy the products from you whenever they will finally decide to purchase the products.
With the powerful tool of remarketing ads, you can retarget the website visitors on different platforms. Show them different ad copies with the pure intention of educating them about your products and services. This will help them make an informed decision.
Analysis paralysis
Analysis paralysis is a psychological phenomenon. It plays a major role in marketing. Analyzing the performance based on incorrect parameters and/or insufficient data can lead to analysis paralysis. This situation prevents us from making the decisions or it leads to making the wrong decision.
How to avoid this?
Clearly define your marketing objectives and goals.
Based on your objectives and goals, prepare a list of Key Performance Indicators (KPI). These metrics will help you make the decisions.
Prepare a list of secondary performance indicators. These metrics will help if you are not able to make any decision based on your KPIs.
Make sure your MarTech stack is tracking these metrics.
After a definite interval, analyze the performance of the campaigns based on your KPIs.
Not involving the sales team in the marketing
While the purpose of marketing activities is to generate demand for products and services, the organizational goals are always aligned with generating maximum sales. To achieve this, it is important to know whether the marketing efforts are put in the correct direction. If we are targeting an audience that is never going to buy from us, the campaign will fail to produce short-term as well as long-term goals.
The sales conversations can guide the marketing team to improve the overall performance of the campaign. This also helps understand what kind of language the potential customers speak and what keywords/USPs attract them the most. The use of this data will help you improve the overall performance of the marketing activities.
Not using marketing tools
There are plenty of free marketing tools available on the internet, but these tools can help you achieve limited goals. Whenever you reach a situation where free marketing tools are not adding more value to the overall performance, it is highly recommended to use the paid tools. Some AI-based tools can analyze the marketing data and give you deep insights that can help optimize the overall performance of the marketing campaigns.
Not using marketing and sales automation
Many repetitive marketing and sales tasks can be automated using automation tools. For example-: As soon as a customer fills up the lead generation form for your SAAS product, the customer’s email ID can be added to an email automation list. This list will send automated emails to the customer over a period explaining different USPs of the products. This method helps you educate your customers without manual human interaction.
Marketing and sales automation tools save your time and efforts to achieve the desired results. While these tools come at a cost, many tools help us reduce many different human errors and hence, ease the process.
Neglecting the power of employee advocacy programs
This is a very effective marketing strategy for social media channels like LinkedIn. In this, the employees share different company updates on their social media pages. People tend to react to or trust online content more when the content comes from their connections. This increases the organic reach of your content.
Not considering customer’s cognitive biases
Cognitive biases are systematic errors that occur in one’s thinking and reasoning, where individuals create their own “subjective reality” from their perception or beliefs over actual reality. This is the largest phenomenon related to consumer psychology. Not considering customers’ cognitive biases in marketing campaigns may hamper your customer’s purchase decision-making process thereby, losing out on potential sales. Marketers can leverage these cognitive biases by using them in their marketing strategy and campaigns to make them more effective and yield desired results.
Read more about cognitive biases on the following link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_bias
The careful use of cognitive biases in your marketing campaigns eases customers’ purchase journey, ultimately leading to increased sales and satisfied & loyal customers.
Conclusion
These are a few mistakes that we made over a period of 8 years of our marketing experience and we learned the hard lessons that are helping us improve the performance of our marketing campaigns now. We will keep updating this list. Stay tuned for more updates from CrossNibble.