Creating a winning marketing campaign is a fine art and it’s rare to get it right the first time. It takes a lot of work to fully understand your target audience and create a marketing strategy that will resonate with them but it’s important that you do. Otherwise, all of the money that you spend on marketing will be wasted and you won’t see any meaningful increase in sales.
If you launch a marketing campaign and it doesn’t seem to have any impact, it’s easy to be negative and call the whole thing a failure. But before you scrap your entire campaign and go back to the drawing board, you should consider whether there are ways that you can fix it. In most cases, there are certain elements of the campaign that work well, while others are letting it down. It’s far more cost effective to fix a broken marketing campaign than it is to start from scratch. These are the best ways to save your failing marketing campaign.
Do Nothing
Doing nothing might seem counterproductive if your marketing campaign isn’t working but, in some cases, it’s the best strategy. Certain aspects of marketing, like SEO, for example, take a while to have any effect. Unfortunately, a lot of business owners get impatient and they want to see results right away, so they wait a month and then decide that their campaign isn’t working and they should take it in another direction. The problem is, consistency is important in marketing and if you keep adjusting your strategy without giving it time to have an impact, you will send a lot of conflicting messages to potential customers and you won’t be able to build a strong brand.
However, it’s also important that you know when you should wait and when you should take action. Certain marketing strategies, like PPC advertising, should have an impact almost immediately. In that case, waiting is the right thing to do. Although waiting it out isn’t always the answer, it’s important that you give your marketing campaigns time to work before you declare them a failure and start making changes.
Diagnose The Problems
If you have waited a while and there is no improvement, it’s time to start making changes to your marketing campaign. But before you can do that, you need to work out where you’re going wrong in the first place. Blindly changing your marketing campaigns without a clear idea of where the issues are is never a good strategy and it will only lead to more wasted money.
The best way to diagnose the issues with your marketing campaign is to look at your analytics data. Applications like Reveal business intelligence software integrate easily with your current systems and give you a huge amount of data about your marketing campaign and other related areas of your business. By looking closely at all of the data that you collect, you can get an idea about which areas of your marketing campaign are working well and which areas need work. It’s important that you spend time with this data and look through all of the fine details so you can really understand what is going on.
You may find that your campaign resonates with a younger audience but you are missing the older demographic. Maybe you will see that your social media posts are not getting much engagement or posting at certain times of day is far more effective than others. You might even find that you are marketing your products at the wrong people in the first place. Once you have a clear idea of exactly where you are going wrong, you can make targeted changes to rescue your marketing campaign.
Do Something Unique
Digital marketing is incredibly competitive and there are thousands of other companies out there competing for customer’s attention. On social media, people see an endless feed of posts and they’re only likely to stop and read one if it catches their attention. That’s why it’s so important that you do something unique and say something that no other business can. This applies to all of your digital marketing and your content strategy.
When you are designing your marketing campaigns, it’s important that you research your competitors and see what kind of strategy they are using. You will probably notice that most of your competitors are taking a similar approach, so you need to think outside the box and come up with something more interesting. When it comes to social media, it’s important that you make use of a lot of visual media, like photos and videos because they are far more engaging than a simple text post. It’s also important that you focus on writing good quality, informative content that brings value to the customer. The more unique you can make your marketing campaigns, the more likely they are to have an impact.
Offer More To The Customer
Whenever you create a marketing campaign, you are offering something to the customer. In a lot of cases, you are offering a great product for a fair price but sometimes, you may be offering something different. Maybe you provide a link to a free ebook or a discount voucher. However, a lot of marketing campaigns struggle because they don’t offer that much value to the customer at all.
If you notice that your marketing campaign is not making many impressions, consider offering some kind of discount or even lowering the standard price of your product to make it more attractive. Your content strategy is another effective way of offering value to a customer and encouraging them to engage with you.
Explore Different Platforms
One of the major reasons that people struggle with their digital marketing campaigns is that they focus all of their efforts on one platform. However, different social media platforms cater to a different market segment, so it’s important that you explore all of them. For example, if you do most of your social media marketing on Instagram, you’re likely to reach a younger audience. But what if you are also trying to market to the older generation as well? In that case, other platforms like Facebook and Twitter are incredibly important because they have a wider audience. Where business-to-business marketing is concerned, LinkedIn is a valuable tool that you can’t overlook. Taking a single channel approach rarely works and if your marketing campaign is not effective, branching out into different channels could help to improve the situation.
It’s also important that you consider how you use each channel. Instagram and Snapchat are perfectly suited to visual marketing and you will get the most engagement if you use good quality photo and video posts. If you are looking to use more paid ads, Facebook is probably a better option. Twitter, on the other hand, is great for sharing links to your content and boosting traffic to your site. Using the same strategy across all platforms will not work, which is why it’s important that you understand the differences between each platform and which strategies are best suited to those platforms.
Reconsider Your Audience
Sometimes, your marketing campaign gets a lot of impressions but that doesn’t translate to an increase in sales because you are targeting the wrong audience. If you have a high bounce rate, that means that your marketing campaigns are inspiring people to visit your site but they leave shortly afterwards because they have no interest in your products. That’s why you should consider changing your audience and trying to reach a different demographic.
When you are first setting up your business and developing your products, it’s important that you do extensive market research. Look into your competitors and see what kind of audience they are trying to cater to. You should also run focus groups to determine which demographic is most likely to have an interest in your products. Once you have decided who your target audience is, you need to do your research so you can build a clear customer profile. As long as you know your target audience inside out, it’s much easier to create a marketing campaign that resonates with them. However, if your marketing campaign isn’t working, it’s important to consider whether you are targeting the wrong people and think about whether you would have more success with a different demographic.
Scale Up
In some cases, your marketing campaign is working but you are not making much of an impression because you are not dedicating that many resources to it. For example, you might have created some amazing PPC ads but if you only dedicate a small portion of your budget to it, you won’t see much of an increase in traffic. That’s why scaling up your marketing campaign and spending more money on it could be the answer. However, it’s important that you examine your campaign closely before you do this because spending more money on a campaign that isn’t working is only going to put you in a worse position.
If your marketing campaign doesn’t give you the results that you hoped for, you shouldn’t give up on it right away. Instead, try making some of these changes to see whether you can get your campaign back on track.
