Revising your marketing strategy to see what worked and what didn’t, means going back to basics and looking at each activity. It can be a difficult process if you feel bruised after your campaign flopped. But you can turn a loss into an amazing piece of marketing research in order to gain detailed insights in your target audience.
You will learn information about the market, your product and your audience that you could not have understood before. Armed with this new insight your marketing strategy will be much stronger at the start of your next campaign. If you don’t take this chance to find out why your campaign went wrong, then your next one could fail for the same reasons.
Whether your latest marketing campaign made a splash or barely caused a ripple, you can use that information to make your next campaign the best one yet.
Find out what worked in your marketing strategy
First of all – look at what went well with your marketing activity and see if you can do more of that next time. Perhaps you launched a social media campaign that generated a lot of interest within your target market. Did you have a particular direct email message that people clicked on more than all the others? Did you notice a print advert brought in lots more customers the week it came out? It’s vital to get to the bottom of these questions because they will offer you some useful hints about what appeals most to your customers. Well done – you got something right. Now you have to analyse why it went right in order to repeat that success when you revise your next marketing strategy.
Look at what went wrong
Then comes the hard part – looking at where you went wrong. It may be painful to go over disappointing sales figures or an event that was badly attended, but your results can be especially relevant when planning your next marketing campaign or revising your whole marketing strategy. This is true even when the campaign fell flat on its face, because you can gain valuable insights from looking at what activities failed. Read more about marketing analytics in our previous blog to find out where campaigns often fail.
Not every marketing campaign is a total success, and this can be down to a change in the market, timing or competition. But one of the most common problems is not properly understanding your market. This is something you can solve with a little back to basics research.
Go out and talk to the market
Stop guessing what people want – go out and talk to them. Find out what people in your target market care about, what problems they have, what they think about your product and where they get their information. What are their likes, dislikes, hobbies, favourite products? What is their age, income and occupation? Armed with all of this you can start to see what you have to do next in order to meet their needs with your product. This research also reveals where best to reach your target audience so that you can place more emphasis on those channels next time, when you revise your marketing strategy.
Research your marketing channels
Maybe your message was right but it didn’t reach your audience because it used the wrong channels. Maybe you ran a radio campaign but your target audience listen to a different station, or never listen to the radio at all. Perhaps the best way to reach them is on Facebook, or a trade magazine may be the best spot for them to see your product. Where do your potential customers get their news and information? Find out which channel will have the most impact for your product or service and use that information to focus your next campaign.
Regroup and revise
Call a team meeting so that you can share what you have discovered. With your team, think about how you can build this new information into your next plan. If your target market is different from the one you thought, draw up a new profile for them. Start to build new contact lists and change your database. Make a list of what marketing activities can be ditched and what to do more. Revising your marketing strategy will draw together all the new information you have gathered and help you turn one failure into a future success.
For more advice on defining your target audience, read our blog ‘Four steps to a killer marketing plan‘.