At the start of every Content Marketing campaign a marketing department projects they success they want from it. They know how many new leads they want to get. From that they then estimate how many of those will become great leads. Then they project how many will become hot leads ready to buy. All of this culminates in how many of those hot leads ready to buy actually buy and become customers.
The Challenge a Marketing Department Faces is in The Numbers
Their success is based on each and every marketing piece in each campaign. If a marketing piece doesn’t interest the people receiving it, those people will not go to the next step. If they don’t, the number of new customers who actually buy may be less than the marketing department projected.
The marketing campaign is not as successful as they forecast. They don’t get the number of new customers they told the executives in our company to expect. The company’s goals won’t be reached. The president’s and executives’ opinion of the marketing department and its staff drops.
Two Ways to View an Unsuccessful Content Marketing Campaign
The first is to consider it as deadly. It’s the end of the world. It will ruin you and your career. You will never recover. You will never be able to restore your reputation. You will never rebuild your trust with those in the company who really matter.
The second is to realize that no one is successful 100% of the time. Everyone makes mistakes. When you look at a mistake you make as the end of the world, you learn nothing from it. A better approach is to see what you can take from it. What did you do wrong? How can you avoid it in the future?
When you do this, the mistake made becomes a learning opportunity. You can then apply what you learned to prevent it from happening again.
A Great Thing About Content Marketing Campaigns . . .
. . . is you can always go back and correct what you have done.
If you expected to get 50 new leads from a blog post you wrote and you only got 10, you can write another article or a blog post to generate more.
If a white paper or case study is not as successful as you expected them to be, rewrite the white paper and case study to see if that will generate the results you wanted.
When a Content Marketing campaign is not as successful as you thought it would be, that is telling you one or more marketing pieces in it did not appeal to the people who read them. Review those marketing pieces carefully and figure out why. Then make the changes you need to in your next one.
People Just Getting Into Content Marketing Have High Expectations
Why? Because they feel they are very good at their job. Pride comes into the picture. They feel they write so well that readers are just going to jump at what they are saying. They are going to be anxious about finding out more and buying what the marketer is offering.
Reality sets in when that doesn’t happen. Their egos are crushed when several of their marketing pieces don’t get the results the expected. It may have been that their timing was not right. The readers were preoccupied with something else.
It would be nice if all marketing was black and white. If you write this piece or send this piece out, you will connect with this many people. However, marketing is normally gray. You can never be sure of how many will buy into what you are saying.
The Key to Remember
When your marketing is not as successful as you thought it would be, don’t take it personally. Take a look at it closely to figure out what happened. Why didn’t it get the results you expected? Make any changes necessary and proceed from there.
