5 Steps To Take When Your Online Campaign Misses the Mark

by Charles Pobee-Mensah, Director of Digital Marketing No one likes seeing low numbers. We all know the feeling of seeing lackluster results. But the difference between the winners and the losers is what you do in response. Get ready to turn this ship around. Here are five steps to take when your online campaign misses the mark.

Get More Information

To figure out what went wrong, you need to know more. We’re specifically looking for more data to help explain where things went south. Let’s use the example of a jeweler who ran a Facebook ad campaign to encourage sales of their discounted aging inventory and found that there haven’t been many more sales in that area since the campaign started. Here are some additional pieces of information to gather.

Facebook engagement
Landing page views
In-store and phone inquiries

Find the Funnel’s Weakness

Each of these areas creates a path that the potential customer can take to buying. Regardless of how simple it is, there is usually some type of marketing funnel that customers go through before purchasing. At some point along this path, too many people are being held up. Unable to get all the way through. Maybe very few people are interacting with the Facebook ads promoting it. Perhaps the number of views on the landing page is very low. It could be that the people are asking about the collection, but never seem to pull the trigger to buy.

Think About The Human

Once our jeweler has identified potential weaknesses, it’s important to think through the journey that the customer makes from the first time they encounter the ad on Facebook, all the way to the time that they make the purchase. Many people forget that digital marketing, like all marketing, is all about people. Don’t be fooled by thinking that there is some technical marketing trick to fix what’s going on here. Our jeweler shouldn’t assume that adjusting the demographic targeting on Facebook will fix things when the actual problem is that the jewelry isn’t very pretty. Putting biases to the wayside and thinking through the experience of the human being will enable success. When every piece of the campaign from the wording in the ad to the knowledge with the salesperson is properly considered, a well-built campaign will pay big dividends.

Adjust and Try Again

After thinking through the process, our example jeweler finds that a lot of people are clicking over to the website, but they stop there. By traveling through the buying process like a human, it was clear to our jeweler that it’s because there is no gallery of pieces on the landing page. There is a lot of information and a nice graphic about the sale, but the missing piece that the jeweler immediately felt when visiting the page like a customer was the inability to see these specific pieces. To fix this, our jeweler decided to add the gallery and give the campaign more time. It’s important to adjust and try again. It would have been easy for our jeweler to take none of these steps and quit running Facebook ads. But that wouldn’t have been a smart move. In marketing, it’s very important to give campaigns the time and money needed to find out what truly works.

Kill or Scale

Over time, however, a marketing campaign must either perform or be stopped. If, after several attempts at adjusting the campaign, there isn’t progress, it’s time to kill the campaign and try something else. And this will by no means be a failure on the part of the jeweler. This type of trial is simply necessary for jewelry store marketing. If, however, our example jeweler finds that adding the gallery solves the problem, then it’s time to scale. This is the perfect time to increase the amount being spent on Facebook and see how many more people will be interested in the discounted products. Use these steps the next time you come across lackluster results in your marketing campaigns and you’ll make success more likely to happen.