What to Do When Your Business Fails at Marketing

Only a handful of entrepreneurs have been truly successful with their first business ventures. A study by Forbes found that, out of 960 billionaires, 830 have made money from multiple ventures. This proves that even the world’s most successful people aren’t immune to business failures.

Most of them have gone through quite a few failed businesses — some of which were pretty disappointing. Failures even before they earned their first million dollars. This indicates that their success is simply the result of them persevering and not accepting failure.

Businesses too, face major challenges when a marketing campaign fails after its execution. Marketing fails not only damage your brand’s reputation but also hurts the company financially in the process. The good news is, you can certainly recover and work towards improving your marketing strategy for the future.

In this post, we’ll discuss a few ways you can either fix, drop, or launch an entirely new marketing campaign. Essentially, these are the things you need to do when your business fails at marketing.

 

#1. Re-evaluate Your Audience

One of the biggest challenges that businesses face is in defining their target audience. For this reason, many marketing campaigns often fail.

This happens predominantly due to the following reasons:

• Targeting the wrong audience: Targeting the wrong audience is one of the biggest rookie mistakes that marketers make. This leads to missed opportunities for sending a message to your actual target audiences. You fail to make yourself visible to the people who really matter. Instead, you end up spending your marketing budget on people who are unlikely to ever buy from you.
• Content is irrelevant: This is another major mistake many marketers make when it comes to the type of content being promoted. This happens when your brand fails to recognize the type of content your potential audience wants and is interested in. As a result, your marketing campaign is forced to crash-land.

How to Find the Right Audience

In order to fix the first concern regarding “targeting the wrong audience,” you need to analyze and understand your customer base.

Here are a few questions you need to ask yourself:

1. Who Are Your Audiences?

Know that customer satisfaction is the ultimate goal of any marketing campaign. Analyze who is already buying from you i.e. their age groups, locations, genders, social media presence, and so on. It’s true that demographic profiles are often limited in their potential of uncovering buying patterns and motivations. However, they act as great starting points for analysis of your audience base.

A basic understanding of where your prospects are from and how they live their lives is essential. Without it, it’s very difficult to understand their needs and motivations. So remember to analyze your audience profiles based on demographics.

You can use tools like Google Trends to analyze your audience base using the keywords that you rank for. This will help get an idea of where most of your audiences are located. Apart from that, Alexa can help analyze the visitor demographics to a website.

2. What Interests Them?

Every person in your audience base cares for something deeply. It could be a desire, an aspiration, a dream, or an issue that they’re dealing with. Whatever it may be, you need to understand them so that you can gain entry into their everyday discussions.

Understanding your audience’s interests will help you create engaging content and marketing strategies. Once you start to develop an audience profile, you’ll start to understand what drives them. Twitter Analytics and Facebook Audience Insights can help understand your audience’s interests.

3. Where Do They Search for Information?

Choosing the right channels to publish content is critical. There are multiple motivational factors to consider when publishing content on a particular platform, including:

• Is the channel popular enough? Use publishers who will get your content in front of a large number of people. Such platforms will also increase your credibility.
• How will your brand benefit from using a particular channel for publishing content?
• Is it the right choice keeping in mind your audience demographics and interests?

Publishing content on channels where your audience spends most of their time can really help get the visibility you seek. So choose your social media channels for marketing wisely. The same goes for finding target sites for guest posts.

4. Whom Do They Trust?

Consider who or what your audience trusts. They could be celebrities, public speakers, other brands, popular YouTubers, or Instagrammers. If you can find a way to partner with these trusted sources, your audience will start trusting you more. Collaborating with the right influencers can strengthen this trust immensely.

5. Is Your Content Relevant?

In order to ensure that your content is relevant to your target audiences, focus on consumer research. You can use platforms like Creative Consumer Research to get reports or studies about consumer behavior. These will help you understand what your audience wants and what are the things your current marketing campaign lacks.

 

#2. Re-evaluate Your Site’s Performance

Using multiple efficient marketing channels and great quality content can go a long way in making your marketing campaigns successful. However, you must also evaluate your website’s performance. The rule of thumb is — an average visitor will leave your page if it does not load within 2 seconds.

Having a website crash in the middle of a transaction or a 404 error page can be detrimental to your conversions. Both of these issues create a negative experience and can make customers never want to return to your website.

Poor website hosting is a key issue for small businesses using shared servers. Hence, you should work extensively on proper website hosting to improve your website’s performance. You can use services such as WebPageTest and Google PageSpeed Insights to assess your website’s performance.

 

#3. Re-evaluate Your Strategy

Your overall promotional strategy plays a major role in determining your marketing campaign’s success. To achieve success, you need to look at the bigger picture, instead of looking for short-term benefits. Thoroughly think through your strategy before launching campaigns.

Here are a set of steps you can follow to create a marketing strategy:

• Analyze data and insights about your target audiences.
• Determine the most effective ways of reaching them.
• Set up simple but realistic and measurable goals.
• Develop steps that’ll help you achieve each goal.
• Create custom content for the marketing campaign.
• Test landing pages or pop-ups.
• Launch and monitor your marketing campaign.

Having a well-thought-out marketing plan increases the chances of success of your campaigns.

 

Final Thoughts

Marketing cannot be a “create it and forget it” strategy. It is an ongoing process where your brand needs to take audience feedback into account and improve your process. The most important aspect of avoiding marketing fails is to understand the reason for the failure and fix it.

Do you know any other ways of fixing failed marketing campaigns? Feel free to let us know in the comments section below.