There’s not a lot worse than gearing up for a marketing campaign, only for it to deliver way below what you expected. You’re hoping for an impressive ROI out of this campaign, but weeks after and you are still looking at some bleak results. In the worst-case scenario, the results are negative and you have made a loss from this campaign. As a marketer, this is a terrible sign as it means you spent a lot of money and didn’t make it all back.
Therefore, you need to go back to the drawing board, hold a meeting with your team, and figure out why this campaign was such a flop. What could’ve been the reasons behind this, and how can you make improvements going forward? Reflecting on previous campaigns is a critical part of marketing as you need to know what went well and what could be improved. Otherwise, if you don’t review the situation, your next campaign could be just as big of a flop.
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Today, you will see a host of possible reasons behind your poor performance. Any one of these things could’ve made your campaign a flop, or a combination of things could be the culprits. Either way, let’s take a look:
You failed to develop proper buyer personas
If you don’t already know what a buyer persona is, that’s a pretty clear indication that this was one of your issues. In a simple sense, buyer personas reflect your perfect idea of a customer. This is the person or people who will be interested in your offerings and most likely want what you’re promoting.
You must conduct enough research into your target market to find your dream customers:
- Interests
- Challenges
- Habits
- Pain points
- Aspirations
- Previous purchases
- Lifestyle
If you don’t have a buyer persona, you won’t be able to understand your target customers. Therefore, your marketing campaign won’t specifically target them. You need to find the proper personas to, effectively, build your campaign around them. All of the content and the strategies you use should target these buyer personas and help you attract the perfect customer. A marketing campaign can easily flop as you are not zeroing in on the right people, decreasing the likelihood that your marketing material will be absorbed or engaged with.
You lacked research
A lot of marketing campaigns flop when they are rushed. Now, rushing could be down here as a reason for your failure, but it’s better to look at the reasons you might have rushed. Most of the time, these failures stem from rushing through the research side of things. Funnily enough, this is probably why you didn’t develop the buyer personas mentioned above; you sped through the research phase and didn’t collect enough information to create the personas.
Furthermore, there are other elements of a marketing campaign that demand a lot of research and attention. You need to look at the current trends, see what other people in your sector have been doing, assess their success and weaknesses, look at your customers, etc. You can never do too much research before launching a marketing campaign. Never rush through this as it lays the foundations of your whole approach.
Think of it like building a house; if you rush the foundations, the whole thing will come crumbling down.
You didn’t have a proper project plan
Too many people forget to approach a marketing campaign as they would any other project. Realistically, this is a big project that you need to plan to ensure you get the desired outcome. Thus, the mistake that could cause your failure is an inability to have a proper project plan. Speak to anyone in project management, and they’ll tell you that the planning stage is the most crucial to elicit the best outcomes.
So, you need to completely revise the planning process for your next marketing campaign. Ideally, you need to have a whole plan written up and outlined for all to see. You can get an easy project planning template online without much fuss, so there’s no excuse to not start planning. Here, you will outline the main objectives of your marketing campaign, along with the steps needed to complete everything.
Consequently, this sets you up for a more successful campaign as you’re basically mapping everything out in front of you. There’s a clear path to see what needs to be done to reach every little goal, leading to the overall objective. Another benefit of a proper project plan is that you see the progression. You can see if things are going well or not, meaning you can make adjustments before the campaign is launched. Thus, you reduce the chances of it releasing and being a flop.
The timing was terrible
Timing is everything in the world of marketing. Experts know the right times to launch campaigns, as well as the wrong ones. For instance, everyone starts getting campaigns together for the big Q4 launch at the end of the year. This is the period of the year where product sales go through the roof, largely thanks to the various holidays during this time. Christmas is obviously the big one, with families and individuals searching for gifts to buy. Thus, everyone has a big Q4 marketing campaign to try to get a slice of the pie at this time.
If you launch your campaign at the beginning of Q4 – or possibly even a month or so later – your chances of success will be very high. It’s a simple case of your target market being more inclined to buy things at this point in the year.
Conversely, if you release your campaign in January, your chances of success will decrease. If Q4 is where consumers go crazy, Q1 is where they’re far more standoffish. After a heavy festive period, people prefer to not spend a lot of money during the early months of the year. So, releasing a campaign in Q1 can be a disaster purely because nobody is interested in spending their money. In the space of a couple of months, your campaign could’ve gone from a winner to a loser, all because of the timing.
Of course, timing is also an industry-specific thing as well. Certain times of the year could be more profitable for your industry than others. It’s all about learning when the best time to launch a campaign is, ensuring it is successful.
You didn’t consider the buyer’s journey
In marketing terms, the buyer’s journey refers to the process that a consumer goes on from searching for a product to actually purchasing it. The exact number of stages in this journey can vary depending on who you talk to. However, Hubspot says there are three, and these are:
- Awareness – the buyer is aware they have a particular problem or need for something.
- Consideration – the buyer figures out their problem and considers what can be done about it.
- Decision – the buyer looks at all the options and decides on the right solution to their problem.
When marketing something, you need to be aware of these different stages as they demand different content. A buyer in the awareness stage will require different marketing content from someone in the decision stage. Where a lot of people go wrong is they produce the same content across the board, then wonder why they aren’t seeing any conversions.
It’s all about understanding the consumer and figuring out where they are in the buyer’s journey. As a result, you need to structure your campaign to include content for each stage, which will funnel the consumer through the process and lead to them making a decision to buy something from you. Get this right, and your campaign will succeed.
The promises didn’t match up with the reality
Lastly, your campaign was a flop because you made a lot of false promises. In essence, you promoted your products or services claiming they did certain things, but the reality is they don’t. This doesn’t necessarily mean you blatantly lied, but it’s more a case of you bending the truth to try and get people to be interested in your offerings.
As a result, you may start generating a lot of leads and interest – meaning your marketing metrics may initially look good. You could see loads of traffic to your site, plenty of clicks on your ads, and everything seems decent. Then, it falls apart at the final hurdle where nobody makes a purchase. This is a clear sign that you have obviously lured people in, but they’ve noticed something at the final stage that stops them from buying your product. Or, even worse, you get a lot of purchases and a lot of returns.
Always ensure that you promise realistic things throughout your marketing campaign. Be honest, sell your product, but don’t go too overboard and make the product seem more impressive than it actually is.
Was your most recent marketing campaign an absolute failure? It could very well have been down to any of the problems mentioned above. Or, it could’ve been down to all of them! Review your campaign, identify where you went wrong, then make changes to ensure a more successful campaign next time.
