So You Think Your Advertising Campaign Failed...
No one wants to fail. Plain and simple. But to become a success, you're going to have to stumble a couple of times.
A large part of digital advertising is testing different campaigns and strategies to learn what works with your target audience to optimise all future marketing endeavours. However, even at the testing stage of any campaign, you should still be getting a reasonable result.
If you find yourself spending a considerable amount of time and money on digital advertising, but you're not seeing a reasonable return on ad spend, chances are the expertise and the ad campaigns that you are running are not working for you.
It might be a multitude of things that are contributing to that failure.
Your Digital Marketing Partner is Not the Right Fit for Your Business
Choosing a digital marketing agency to partner with can be one of the most nerve-wracking and important decisions you will ever make as an entrepreneur. It is imperative for the success of your marketing campaigns that you choose a marketing partner that understands your brand and knows how to speak to your target audience.
Your marketing partners are an extension of your brand, so they should share the same values and company culture with your own business. This will allow you to work seamlessly together without adjusting the way either of you are already working so you can focus on the work.
They should have realistic goals for your marketing strategies and a proven way of showing you they are achieving these goals. They should understand what you're trying to achieve, and they should be able to show that they have reached similar goals for clients in the past.
Digital marketers should be an asset to your business at all times. If you're working with authentic marketers, you will be confident that your hard-earned money and time is being used effectively to get you a great return not only on your ad spend but also your investment in their agency.
Your Customer's Journey is a Closed-Loop, Not Linear
Often, businesses get stuck on the idea that growing means constantly acquiring new customers, and they hyper-focus on obtaining this. But this is not quite the case. A customer's journey with your brand is not linear. They hardly ever go from finding your brand straight to purchasing, and if they do, they don't drop off the face of the planet afterwards.
Your customer's journey is a closed-loop. And if you can keep your customer base within the cyclical marketing sphere of your brand, you will be able to retain your customers for longer and have more meaningful and profitable interactions with them.
If your digital marketing does not include strategies for retention, re-engagement, and retargeting, you could be missing out on valuable opportunities to increase your conversion rate and enhance the performance of your marketing efforts. Both of which result in more money in your pocket.
Understanding Your Numbers and Goals
Knowing your numbers needs to be ingrained in the very lifeblood of your business and what you're doing. It's all about being in control of your business and understanding what your goals should be and whether you're achieving them or not.
If you're not in a place where you can understand what a realistic goal for your business is, you're not ready to achieve it.
By setting a goal that is not realistic for your ad campaigns, you risk feeling like a failure or feeling disheartened when the campaign doesn't achieve what you had in your mind, when in reality it may be achieving or even surpassing what would've been a realistic goal for the campaign.
You need to be able to understand when things are working and when things are not, so you know what to terminate, what to tweak, and what to scale up. The only way you can understand this properly is by understanding your business numbers fully.
If you check the success of an advertising campaign too early, you may believe that it is performing poorly when it just needs a bit of time to get rolling or for more data to become available.
This is especially important to consider since Apple's recent release of iOS 14.5, which has caused a delay in data reporting on many platforms. Before the new OS was released, Facebook, for example, gave you a minute-by-minute update on how your campaigns were performing. Now there is a 5-day delay. If you check too early, you won't be getting the complete picture which may cause you to believe the campaign is not generating results.
Many other changes in the marketplace can affect how your products sell and how your advertising performs. Nothing is more important than tailoring your marketing strategy to keep up with new trends and stay ahead of your competitors to keep your brand growing successfully through changes that have a massive impact on the world of business.
The right digital marketing partner will advise and help you pivot through any changes in the marketplace you may face.
It's never fun to hear that the reason you're not getting sales is your product itself. Sometimes the truth hurts, but it's important to hear. You can have the most comprehensive marketing strategy available, but if your product or audience is not right, it won't matter.
It's not up to a marketer to decide whether or not your business is viable. But the right marketing agency for your business should be honest about your products and services and how they might be perceived by the audience you're trying to sell to.
Digital marketers have a comprehensive understanding of different target audiences and how they respond to different products and advertising strategies because they work with various clients on a large scale every day.
Maybe there are tweaks that can be made to your products and services. Maybe your products would be more successful with a different audience. You'll never know unless you ask hard questions and are willing to accept hard answers. Ultimately, it's for the long-term benefit of your business.
The Big Takeaway
If you experience a perceived failure with your digital marketing, don't lose hope and don't feel disheartened. Instead, take the opportunity to look at what went wrong and what you can change to lead to success next time. Take action— don't just move on.
Say you spend £1000 on an explorative ad campaign, and the results lead you to discover that the product is not popular within your targeted audience. You can look at this one of two ways. Either you can look at this as a waste of £1000 that generated no sales, or you can look at it as an essential learning moment because now you know you need to change either the product or the audience, and you won't make the same mistake again.
Take the time to analyse everything because when things do work, you're going to be able to recognise it, and you're going to feel great about it.
You need to understand the lows so you can experience the highs. But be ready for the sunset because there's a new day of campaigns ahead of you, and you've always got to be prepared for the next step.