By John Eberhard
I’ve been involved in marketing either as a marketing director or VP, or as a marketing consultant, since 1989. Marketing has changed a lot since then. The message that gets people to respond has changed a lot. And even more than that, the medium or platform you’re using to promote (Google, Facebook, email etc.) has become phenomenally more important. In many cases, I have seen that the medium or platform used was more important than the message, in determining success.
And many of the platforms have weird idiosyncrasies that can affect your success. It is possible today to try a campaign on a platform, and get literally no results. This was not the case back in 1989. Today certain platforms may not work for a certain product or service, or there may be a total saturation of providers on the platform that make it harder or prohibitively expensive to use that platform. There can be other factors that affect success.
So it is possible to run a campaign on a given platform for one, or two, or three months, and get zero or hardly any response. So what should you do at that point if that happens?
The wrong thing to do is to quit, bail, throw in the towel.
The right thing to do is to reassess, figure out what went wrong, and try again, often on a new platform that has a better chance of success.
I have one client where I set up a campaign to get people to come in for a free introductory lecture. The first one had one person show up. The next one had three people show up. The third one is next week and we have 41 confirms for it so far. The changes we made were in the message, plus some technical things with the Facebook ad campaign.
But what if that client had bailed after the first event? He certainly wouldn’t be having a very successful event next week.
In marketing today, it is vital to stay the course. To try different things; different platforms, different messages, different offers. And to continue to try different things until you find something that works well for your business that is sustainable. And not to get discouraged or give up when the first thing you do doesn’t hit a home run. Today it is often necessary to go through several efforts before you find something that works effectively.
All the clients that I have that have been with me for a long time have stayed the course, been willing to experiment and try new things, and have not bailed when a given campaign has not worked. That’s what it takes to be successful in marketing today.
