In laying the groundwork for developing an effective marketing strategy, we’ve covered: setting goals, identifying your ideal clients, narrowing your niche, defining your core value, and selecting the right marketing tactics.
The next step — monitoring and managing your campaigns and making necessary adjustments on an ongoing basis — is often the most overlooked aspect of marketing strategy development.
Why Does Campaign Management Get Overlooked?
In part, this happens because busy, and tasks are put off, forgotten, and end up slipping through the cracks.
This is also abetted by the “set it and forget it” mentality that dominates marketing these days. And the current emphasis on all things “marketing automation” reinforces this attitude.
But here’s the problem with the “set it and forget it” approach. Let’s say you’re a business owner, and you (or their support staff) spend a great deal of time, expend a lot of effort, and invest a tidy sum of cash into building a marketing campaign.
But after launching the campaign, you forget about it — moving on to all the other countless tasks on your ever-overflowing to-do list. And when you revisit the promotion six months later and see little to no results, you throw up your hands in disgust, proclaiming: “Marketing doesn’t work!” (Perhaps this scenario sounds familiar?)
Meanwhile, though not every campaign is a winner right out of the gate, with proper attention and care, most campaigns can be successful. And every campaign is sure to be a valuable learning experience.
Here’s a Quick Case Study Demonstrating How Failing to Monitor + Manage Your Marketing Campaigns Can Totally Tank Your Efforts:
It’s been three years since you last updated your website, so you decide it’s time for a complete redesign.
You hire a designer, spend time plotting a detailed redesign, and set specific goals for the new site — A 20% increase in weekly site visits.
And when everything is polished and pretty, the designer hits “Publish,” and viola, your new site goes live!
That project ticked off your to-do list, you dive back into the work that’s piled up while you’re focused on the website redesign.
Six months pass, and it dawns on you that inquiries and leads through your website are down.
You hop into the backend of your website and realize… You never installed an analytics package. And once you get analytics installed and let it run long enough to gather a sufficient dataset (usually at least a month), you discover that not only have you fallen short of your 20% traffic increase goal, but site traffic has completely tanked.
There could be a variety of reasons for this traffic fall-off. It could be a technical issue. It could be the revised content isn’t connecting with your ideal clients. It could be that your site is no longer linked to sources that referred traffic in the past.
Whatever factors are at fault, this unfortunate situation could have been avoided.
If you had only:
a) Installed a complete analytics package when launching the site;
b) Monitored site analytics, checking on traffic at least once a week;
And c) Began troubleshooting potential issues the moment you noticed a decline in traffic.
The Success or Failure of Your Marketing Campaign Often Comes Down to Consistent Monitoring + Management
The website case study is, of course, just one example. But the overarching point here is that If a campaign is failing to drive results, one (or more) of its component parts needs adjustments.
Because ultimately, every marketing campaign’s performance depends on how well you monitor, test, and adjust your strategy and tactics.
Need help marketing your business?
Let’s discuss:
- Launching or updating your website
- Improving your website’s SEO by starting a business blog
- Launching an email newsletter or other keep-in-touch campaigns
- Increasing your online presence with social media marketing campaigns
- Launching a PR campaign to gain media attention for your business
Sound like a plan?
Get in touch here: 310.466.7893 | ryan@ryananys.com