Three Reasons Why Your Marketing Strategy Fails
Strategy is nothing without a solid execution. You can put together a digital marketing strategy that is well thought out and planned but if it is not well executed it is just as likely to fail. If strategy and execution were a double act, strategy would be the one that got all the plaudits for its brilliance, while execution would be the the one driving things forward behind the scenes. Like most double acts though, they feed off each other. Without a decent plan your digital marketing efforts may get lucky and stumble upon something that works but more likely you’ll just stumble. Equally a decent plan, without the chops to execute will result in a similar miss.
All too often we’ve seen time spent developing a clear marketing strategy to be wasted because the execution was bad. In digital marketing today, tactical services are becoming more and more commoditised and automated. We can execute marketing services such as paid search, paid social & SEO more and more easily. With easier to use tools and updated machine learning that helps guide us through setup and maintenance, putting campaigns into market and optimising them can all too often go before planning how we want to utilise these services.
Without some sort of strategic oversight these tactics can fail. Nevertheless even with strategic oversight these things can also fail. In this article we take a high level look at three of the main pitfalls we’ve seen that people fall into when developing their marketing strategies that can cause them to fail. Buckle up we’re going to talk turkey… I mean tactics.
Lack of Assets
The first one is easy. You just don’t have the things you need to bring your strategy to life. We see this a lot with high consideration purchase strategies. Generally with these types of purchases there is a lot of information that the potential customer requires. They’re customer journey is longer and takes more time. All this means you need to be able to deliver more information and more in-depth resources for them to determine whether they are interested in your product or not.
Do you have these core pieces of information? Are you able to develop them easily and well? Over time you may need to refresh them so that they stay current. You may already have the information that customers need but just not in the format that is easy to package and give out.
When it comes to assets it helps to take a look at your sales process. How do you initially gain potential customers, What are the conversations you are typically having with customers? From here you are likely to get a good picture of the consideration journey people take to make purchasing decisions and you can determine whether you have all the assets that you need readily available, or they are available but need reformatting or you need completely start from scratch in building these out.
Lack of Resources
The second issue relates to the first one in quite an obvious way. Let’s say you create your marketing strategy and you decide that you want to convince potential customers with a series of well crafted videos then blog posts before following up with a detailed product online brochure that outlines your service offerings. If you don’t have those assets then you need to have the resources to create them. Bear in mind, you’ll also need to create the relevant ad creative and landing pages to drive these users to so that they watch the video, read the posts and enter their name and address to get the brochure.
Also, a lot of these assets have a time decay on them. You can’t keep using them indefinitely! So you have to plan your resources to ensure that you can create new ads, more blog posts, additional brochures etc etc.
It’s key when developing your marketing strategy that you understand the limitations on your resources so that it fits your ability to deliver it. You need to get an idea of what it is you can deliver on. Take a look around at the skill sets you have in your team and the capacity of the team. You may want to deliver a white paper that perfectly positions your product in the marketplace backed up with a video explainer on it’s values and purpose, but if you don’t have a decent writer and a videographer on the the team or extended team then you have to find something else that is going to fulfill those objectives.
The key here is to determine what the journey is that the customer is likely to take and then to fulfill that journey with assets that you have the resources to create and maintain. We can all too easily want to give our potential customers an experience that is beyond our means. So determine what it is you can create as part of your initial marketing strategy and then also look at what you would like to create as the strategy grows and gains more momentum
Lack of Budget
This cuts both ways. Do you have the budget to create your assets and then do you have a budget to deliver them. So often we see one without the other. Clients that want to develop leads that don’t have a decent place to drive users to convert them to leads. Or clients that have created great content but just don’t have the budget to promote and capture the potential customers from it.
Equally, we’ve seen marketing strategies that rely heavily on types of assets that are either too expensive or too complicated for the companies to actually produce.
Determining your marketing budget is one step in the process but more important is how that budget is divided up to create and generate the pieces needed to deliver it. Determine how much time and money you want to spend actually creating the strategy and then you can work out how you are going to deliver it after that.
Having a strategy is great and we can spend a lot of time developing marketing personas and customer journeys that help to inform our strategies and bring them to life for the customers that we want to reach. However, without taking the time to really determine the capabilities both physically and fiscally you can see the good intentions of a marketing strategy just evaporate.
What this all comes down to is planning. A strategy at its very core is a plan. However, you need to plan both strategically and tactically as thought without action is as useless action without thought.
We spend a lot of time here at Binary & Co talking to our clients about how they can develop their strategies but also how they can bring them to life. We deliver full funnel digital advertising campaigns that really speak to people’s audiences. However, what we do initially is to determine what it is that clients want to achieve and how it is we can help them deliver it.
We hope you found that interesting and informative. We build full funnel digital advertising campaigns that leverage all the data you have in your marketing stack. If you want to find out how we do this or if you just want to chat get in touch with us here.