I spend a lot of time on this blog talking about how you can improve your marketing but what happens when things go wrong?
I’ll never forget in business school when I was a team lead for our capstone consulting project. One day all the team leads participated in a simulated leadership challenge. Think of it as the Oregon Trail for project management. In the simulation, each team member would get notifications that something was going wrong, but rather than fellow travelers getting dysentery or losing an ox, the notifications were along the lines of corporate mistakes or crises. Based on how we responded to each notification, we would advance further on the leader board or fall further behind.
As I made several carefully calculated course corrections each step of the way, I kept falling further and further down the leader board. What was happening??
The answer was and is: I had no idea because I was making way too many well-intentioned course corrections at once. Turns out project management is a lot like digital marketing… it’s best to course correct one step at a time. (By the way, the winner of the challenge was a high-ranking army veteran who explained that in combat there is only time to make one strategic decision at a time… and your life depends on each one.)
I once worked with a client who came to me because she had run a split test on a Facebook ad and was having trouble interpreting the results. She had tested two different audiences and two different messages against each other. When the split test ended, one came out as the clear winner, but whether it was the audience or the messaging was anyone’s guess. Her split test was a well-intentioned marketing strategy, but she fell victim to the temptation to try too many things at once.
It’s really easy to get flustered when things go wrong, or when you’re trying to find as many answers and as much data as possible, but it’s important to resist the temptation of making too many course corrections at once, especially in marketing.
So how does all of this apply to you? Today I’d like you to pick ONE thing that isn’t going as well as you’d like in your digital marketing program. Then, I’d like you to think of the simplest, yet most impactful way you can change that. Here are some suggestions to help:
First, check your channels. Are you in the right place? Are you putting amazing content on Instagram when your ideal customer is a female, over 45 years old, and spending most of her social media time on Facebook? Or, do you have a longer sales cycle with no email marketing program with which to foster that cycle? These are each examples of opportunities for tweaks.
Next, check your audiences. You might think you’re talking to your ideal customer, but are you? Hint: Make sure you are reaching folks who are actually going to spend money on your product. If a teenager is talking to his parents about an electric scooter he saw in a TikTok video and then his parents see that scooter in a Facebook ad, that is where his parents will buy it… not on TikTok. Sometimes your audience is different than the person who is ultimately making the purchase. Make sure you are using your channels appropriately.
Finally, evaluate your content. If you’ve evaluated your channels, made tweaks one-by-one, and still are having trouble, it’s time to reevaluate your content. Content is the hardest thing to change, so I always advise trying the simpler stuff above first. If you do change your content, try adding specificity. Nine times out of ten you are falling into the famous content marketing trap: Speaking to everyone is speaking to no one.
Before I go, I want to give a specific troubleshooting strategy for paid traffic because many readers of this blog use paid traffic, namely Facebook/Instagram or Google ads. Here is the order with which I suggest you tweak ads that are not working, one step at a time:
- Improve your targeting (tweak your audiences). If possible, create and use warm, custom audiences. I recommend retargeting video views or IP addresses over blindly creating an interest-based audience for Facebook and Instagram. For Google, I recommend a bigger focus on long-tailed, unbranded keywords vs. short-tailed unbranded keywords (unless you have a bigger budget).
- Tweak your text: Speak more directly to your ideal customer. Do a split test to see what works best.
- Change your image to a video. If you are already using a video, reshoot with more specific messaging. Always be sure to add captions.
Now, go enjoy your problem solving and don’t forget to stick to one change at a time. As always, if you have questions, email me at [email protected]. I try to answer whenever possible and sometimes your questions turn into future blogs!
