The Nitty Gritty:
- What four big-picture reasons cause marketing campaigns to fail
- Why it’s important to have a willingness to explore the reasons for failure
- What are some of the common tactical points of failure
On this week’s episode on the Profit. Power. Pursuit. podcast I tackle the question, “Why Marketing Campaigns Fail” with Brigitte Lyons, founder of B, a marketing and PR agency that works primarily with small organizations to hone their marketing message and market positioning. We discuss some of the main challenges business owners in this new economy face every time they go out and market a new product or service. There are so many predictable reasons why marketing campaigns fail and we examine these roadblocks in this discussion so you can avoid them in the future.
Four Big-Picture Reasons that Cause Marketing Campaigns to Fail
The marketing should be baked into the product that you’ve developed and that requires you starting with your audience.
– Tara Gentile
So often, businesses only want to focus on their successes and never want to look at the reasons something fails. In our opinion, this is a missed opportunity. All the answers you need about your marketing tactics should be answered in your marketing strategy. Too often business owners question if they are posting on social media enough (or too much) or if they should amp up their content marketing. This focus on tactical efforts is always a clear signal that a business hasn’t thought through the strategy of a marketing campaign or really put a road map into place.
The most common reasons that Brigitte and I see for marketing campaigns to fail include:
- You put your needs ahead of the needs of your audience.
- You don’t set crystal-clear expectations around what success is and don’t run the numbers around what that will take.
- You save marketing for last (but it should be first).
- You don’t use your failures as an amazing learning opportunity.
Be Willing to Explore the Reasons for Failure
Sometimes it requires a little creative thinking to match your needs with theirs.
– Brigitte Lyons
When you start feeling like you need to convince your customers or they are very excited about your message yet have a very big BUT that holds them back from purchasing, these are red flags that you have a problem. It might be a marketing, communication or messaging problem; perhaps you have a position, product or format problem. Whatever it is, you need to reach out to your customers, preferably in person or on the phone to uncover what they don’t like. It is important to get curious to explore what the underlying problem really is.
Common Tactical Points of Failure
Listen to the full podcast to learn the six common tactical points of failure for a marketing campaign that include relying on social media to sell your products or services and your follow-up (or not following up) and to hear all of our takeaways for why marketing campaigns fail and how you can avoid those issues.
Our discussion is a great intro to a class I will be doing on CreativeLive, “Create a Marketing Plan to Grow Your Standout Business.” If you tune in on August 1 and 2 you can watch and learn for free. RSVP today!
You can also find me {most} Mondays (and sometimes Brigitte joins in, too) on my CoCommercial Crowdcast channel where I talk about the ins and outs of growing a small company you love.
