Everyone in your organization from the CEO to the delivery boy had a say in your last marketing campaign. Ideas were either rejected or improved upon. Every possible marketing medium was used to get your message across to the masses. After weeks of discussion and months of preparation your marketing campaign is launched with great expectation.
The marketing strategy your company put into action was a complete failure. Instead of having a profitable return on investment (ROI) you have now spent a lot of time and money with little to show for it. The CEO wants to know where things went wrong and more importantly, who to blame.
Developing a marketing strategy is never an easy process. If there was a simple solution to this, marketing would all be the same and marketers in general would be out of a job. Unfortunately there is no one particular formula or marketing strategy that will get your company noticed. In other words there is no one person to blame for failure in a marketing campaign.
Some marketing research says that the average person comes across 4,000 advertisements in a given day. What makes a person take time out of their day and ignore the other 3,999 ads they might come across in a day?
After the last marketing campaign of bloated hype, hefty costs and weighty ideas it may be time to put your marketing strategy on a D.I.E.T. instead of finding someone to blame. Here are a few words to remember when strategizing for your next marketing campaign:
Discussion: Controversy need not be a bad thing. Discussions are not always everyone sitting around agreeing with everything a person or a company says. Discussions are created when another has a differing point of view, an idea that can add to the whole or a suggestion on how to make improvements. Make sure to encourage conversation with your audience and let them know they are wanted. Whatever your marketing message is about make it interesting enough that people want to talk about it in some manner.
Inspiration: Reading a brochure, article or website that has a plethora of facts and figures along with a testimonial thrown in here and there is fine if your company is marketing to others in your niche industry. If a company has a wider audience then that, instead look to inspire your audience. Capturing emotions within your audience gives a business a human side. We all prefer to deal with real beings and not robots or machines. We want to do business with real people who understand our problems, issues and fears.
Entertainment: Have fun when designing a marketing campaign and make your marketing strategy engaging for your audience. Interact with them in a way that makes them smile. Even if your business is a serious enterprise, your marketing does not have to be serious 100% of the time. Life can bring us all down on a daily basis so when a company can find a way to market with humor it can stand apart from the competition.
Tips: Every marketing campaign should include information about a company or their services. More importantly a company needs to show how using their products or services can assist their audience in improving some aspect of their lives. Your audience does not care that your widget is the best one on the market unless it can somehow make a difference for them.
The next time you design a marketing strategy that does not live up to expectations, instead of trying to assign blame maybe it is time instead to think about what Henry Ford once said:
“Don’t find fault, find a remedy”.
