Identifying issues with your marketing Strategy & Campaigns

Is your marketing consistently not meeting targets? Or receiving engagement from nontargeted audiences? Or in fact is there zero engagement at all?

These are common issues face by CMO's & marketing directors, especially in SME's where budget is often heavily constrained.

To know the best solution is to know the key, underlying issues your facing and unfortunately that can be quite a task. You may believe it's the entire brand that's causing the issue, or is it just one small brand voicing choice that derailing the entire campaign? Why has it not met expectations?

It requires a step back to be taken and questions need to be asked.

At Focal, we start with a list of questions to ask the client when we're 'becoming' part of their team.

1.    Company key objectives?

2.    What is the service/product being provided?

3.    Who is the target audience & why?

4.    Do people in the audience need this? This is a key question because it dictates the messaging you can start applying. For example, if it is a luxury item ("A nice to have" as we call it) for this specific audience then it'll be handled differently to your classic toilet paper brand.

5.    What are our differentiators? Again, this is key as it should form the key messaging of your strategy.

6.    What are my KPI's and are they appropriate to the objectives?

I'll stop here as I'm sure you're starting to see what I'm doing. Answering those five questions will indicate if there's an issue with the entire marketing strategy rather than the entire campaign.

If the campaign's messaging doesn't align with your entire strategy than a whole manner of seemingly bizarre results can appear, with some posts smashing targets & others falling by the wayside.

If you're certain that your strategy makes sense, the campaign lines with the strategic objectives & details but you're still getting poor results, then you have a slightly easier problem to deal with.

The campaign simply isn't engaging to the audience. You can sit there in shock and baffle at how this could be a possibility, but you know it in your heart. This isn't an insult to you & your teams creative prowess, but clearly there's been a mismatch between the teams understanding of the audience and the actual understanding of the targeted audience.

This is still easily fixable as long as you can understand why. Use the above questions indicate which approach maybe worth taking.

Buyer Enablement: I think I have banged on about this in a few articles now. This content/campaign basis is to enable your prospects and is useful only when your campaign has grasped the attention of your audience.

Studies have shown that enabling customers to carry out their own decision making improves sales, both for B2C & B2B. For example, an online calculator for your service so customers know what they may be paying. This may sound like a risk but it's quite the inverse as it builds underlying trust between you & the customer.

Directing your customers to your enabling content could solve a lot of your issues.

The line: "The what?" I hear you ask.

"The line" as we call it is our mental explanation of how we come up with our strategies and content ideas. It forces you to forget about what is normally done in marketing and start think about what could be done, to show you what your marketing could be.

We elaborate more on his concept here: I must implore you to read it.

Essentially it boils down to this; We find the thing that's going to far, too creative or could be interpreted negatively from their audience (and others) and work back from that point. It's a method of getting people to think outside their self-imposed box and build confidence to discuss ideas that the majority would consider too risky.

This doesn't contain just the spoken word, but how the message is communicated. Innovation requires people to be pushed.

Final note

We use these methods to solve our client’s issues, and there is no reason why it can't work for you. It simply requires patience and a clear understanding of what you are trying to achieve. Marketing strategies change, they are flexible, fickle things. Keeping the objective & organisational tone will ensure you always land on the solution.

Now, go out there and do some of that marketing stuff.