It’s a familiar story. You spend months planning an extensive marketing campaign. You’ve read the books, tuned in to the webinars and podcasts, and scoured YouTube and LinkedIn for expert advice. You’ve done your due diligence, and you are sure that THIS will be the campaign that finally boosts awareness, brings in those juicy leads, and grows your business. Huzzah! Smell that sweet, sweet success!
And then you launch, hopes high! But then… as the results trickle in, they are, at best, underwhelming. At worst, your campaign sputters and dies without leaving so much as a bug splatter on your windshield—it bombs. Bad. And now you have the sads, no new customers, and a corpulent advertising bill.
What went wrong?
Having spent over 20 years in the marketing world, I’ve seen countless campaigns struggle to deliver the results they promised. The truth is, even well-intentioned and meticulously planned campaigns can fall into common traps. By recognizing and avoiding these pitfalls, you can significantly increase your chances of success. Easier said than done, though, am I right?
Let’s start here:
Pitfall #1: No Clear Objective
Many campaigns fail because there was never a clear goal set from the start. “We want to increase awareness!” isn’t a measurable objective. For a campaign to work, you need to know what you are measuring for and be ultra-specific in defining success. Do you want to generate 300 new leads for your sales team? Get 1,000 new social media followers? Boost website traffic by 20 percent? Quantify your objectives. You wouldn’t play a hockey game without a net at both ends of the rink—isn’t that where the puck is supposed to go? Marketing without a clear objective is the same idea. You cannot score if you don’t have a goal(post).
Pitfall #2: No Target Audience Persona
Too many companies still market to a generic, faceless crowd instead of being specific about their ideal customer. Start by creating detailed buyer personas to intimately understand your target audience’s pain points, goals, and motivations. Only then can you craft messaging that powerfully resonates with them. And when I say persona, I mean turn on your creative brain and CREATE your ideal customer from the ground up.
Example: You run a photography business specializing in pet portraits. Who is your ideal client? Preferably someone with a pet, I would assume—which is a huge percentage of the population, right? Let’s narrow it further: Your ideal client is someone who worships their fur baby. Maybe their dog or cat or Brazilian jewelled tarantula is literally (in their mind) their child, and their day-to-day decisions are made around what best suits the needs of their beloved.
Let’s give this customer a name—Lucy—and now let’s draw an entire world around Lucy and the needs of her sparkly danger baby (named Miley Spider), considering everything from Lucy’s age, occupation, income, political leanings, where she spends her time when she’s not buying bugs to feed Miley. Draw a complete profile of Lucy and then fashion your campaign to match everything you know about her.
Another persona that would work for pet portraiture? Dog show people. Make up a new customer—call her Lori and give her a brood of beagles. How can you make Lori, the beagle breeder’s life easier? What are her pain points (besides hearing loss from all the baying and barking)? Figure out who she is and what she needs, create your campaign to address her specifically, and watch those conversions roll in, especially after she tells her dog show friends what amazing services you provide.
Pitfall #3: Trying to Be Everything to Everyone
With a laser focus on your core persona, resist the urge to water down your messaging in an attempt to appeal to a wider group. The more targeted your messaging, the more convincing it will be to your ideal customers. Riffing further on the pet portraiture business above, don’t water down your campaigns to include suburban moms who want Christmas card photos of their three human children (unless you want to photograph three human children in matching denim outfits, then have at it).
Hyperfocus on your Lucys and Loris and craft your messaging in a way that almost feels like an inside joke. Who doesn’t love snickering over something any Regular Joe or Jenny won’t understand? Customers do—your ideal client will seek you out when you connect with them on a level beyond sell, sell, sell.
Pitfall #4: No Measurement Plan
What gets measured gets managed. Tracking key metrics is the only way to determine what’s working and what’s not. What kind of metrics matter? It depends on your product and objectives, but sales revenue and lead generation are significant indicators that something is (or is not) working. What about traffic—site visits, page views, time spent on site, traffic sources, referrals, bounce percentages? For social media, what kind of engagement are you seeing? Are people liking and/or commenting? What about shares? How are your conversions, i.e., are people signing up for your freebie or lead magnet or your email list? Are people purchasing? Conversions will track how well your campaign motivates people to take the desired action. What’s your ROI (return on investment)? Are you using Google Analytics or Meta Business Suite (including website pixels), LinkedIn Campaign Manager, Moz, or similar to track what you’re spending vs. what you’re earning?
The most basic way to track ROI is to take whatever metric you were aiming for, baseline your current results, define your marketing investment, and then measure any difference in results after your campaigns are underway or have wrapped up. The official formula for sales is (Amount Gained – Marketing Cost) / Marketing Cost). For example, let’s say our pet portrait photographer wants to see more sales (we’ll use round numbers to keep things simple):
- In May, our pet photographer books 50 clients at $200 each for a base income of $10,000.
- They decide to spend $2,000 on a one-month social media campaign to test boosted posts and influencer content, with costs evenly distributed between boosted and influencer content.
- In June, bookings increase by 50% to 75 clients, resulting in $15,000 in sales.
- On review, the metrics show that five bookings were made from boosted social content/links, while 20 were made from influencer content/links:
- Boosted post bookings: $1,000
- Influencer post bookings: $4,000
- Using our ROI calculation, we see that growth was $5,000. Their costs were $2,000, giving the pet photographers an increased profit of $3,000 or 150% ROI!
- For my math nerds: [(5000-2000)/2000]x100=150
The pet photography business also learns that influencer posts are the way to go moving forward, giving it a better shot at increasing its ROI even more during its next campaign.
TL;DR: You need marketing analytics tools to track things like website traffic, clicks, form fills, phone calls, et cetera, that happen after someone sees your ad. This helps attribute sales to ad views or clicks that happened earlier.
Wrapping It Up
No single tool will show this full buyer journey and give you perfect ROI figures. However, using a mix of website analytics, marketing automation, surveys, etc., you will be able to estimate your ROI as accurately as possible. So, build robust measurement and analytics from the start, or you’ll be flying blind.
Avoiding these pitfalls will move the needle in your favour. But even when you do everything right, there are still no guarantees. Isn’t marketing FUN? The difference is that by dodging common screw-ups, you’ll be able to course-correct quickly if things veer off orbit. Stay nimble, focused on your goal, and über-committed to creating value for your target audience. (Speaking of Uber, can they help bring the astronauts home?)
Wishing you barking success on your next campaign!
