PITFALLS TO AVOID WHEN CREATING A MARKETING CAMPAIGN

Creating a marketing campaign is a daunting task that can seem hard to tackle. Mistakes happen to even the most advanced marketing professional, and unfortunately, they are not always realized until the end of the campaign. We’ve listed out the most common mistakes to help you avoid them:

Not Defining a Goal

This seems like a no brainer, but it often isn’t. You must define tangible goals. What do you hope to accomplish? Don’t be lulled into saying “we want to make money”, come up with measurable and definable goals. Try “We want to improve our response rate by X%”, “We want to see $XXX,XXX revenue generated” or “I want to grow our followers by X”. By coming up with goals that can be monitored and measured, nothing can be left up to interpretation or discussion. Your campaign is successful or not successful; the goals were met or not met. If the goals weren’t met, try and understand why that is and how you can improve next time.

Lack of Planning

We all get so caught up in our daily tasks that sometimes it’s hard to look ahead. Marketing people notoriously wear a lot of hats within a company, but we can’t do everything. We also don’t have the ability to come up with a solid marketing plan at the last minute. Put together an overall marketing strategy for the next year while still in the 4th quarter of the previous one. Start planning your holiday strategy in the summer. Planning ahead will lend itself to a successful campaign and helps you avoid some of the other pitfalls.

Lack of Research

Research is often rushed or nonexistent when you are short on time or staff… And ironically, this is the most important step. Research your company’s past campaigns and see what worked and what didn’t. Look for successful campaigns that have room for improvement. Gather information from other departments. Including people who aren’t trained to think with a marketing brain is a great idea. You would be surprised how a fresh perspective can shape a campaign in a great way. Then do outside research. What are others in the industry doing? What are your competitors doing? How outwardly successful are they? Combine all this to come up with an educated decision on a direction. But, beware of…

Faulty Data

This one is a hard one to avoid but can make planning a strategy that much harder. Try and make sure your data you are working with is as clean and error free as possible. There is no way to have 100% clean data, but you want it as to be as close as possible. Try and regularly get your customers to update their information, either manually or when placing an order with your company. A great way to make sure you have clean data is to require fields when customers are interacting online. This means, the more accurate the data, the more accurate the results of your marketing campaign.

A Disjointed Relationship with Sales

Sales and Marketing department should work hand in hand with each other throughout the process of creating a marketing campaign, from inception to implementation. The partnering of these two teams, ensures that everyone is working to common goals that are for the good of the company. Marketing is to provide feedback to sales on where and how they are generating leads, and sales can confirm that the marketing campaign is working. Without this relationship, it is more likely for goals to not be reached and a marketing campaign to fail.