The marketing field is growing and changing almost every day. It is becoming more and more complex and this means that there is more to learn, more to do and more to track.
You might construct a flawless marketing strategy— but, it could still fail. While there are numerous problems and circumstances that influence the failure of a solid marketing strategy, one that you need to be aware of is failure due to lack of employee knowledge or capability. If an employee is inexperienced with a certain job, or doesn’t know how to execute the strategy you have laid out for them, even the best of plans will fail.
“Inexperience” is a blanket term for many issues that employees might face within a marketing department. Let’s take a look at these issues and how they might arise.
It’s not what you sell that matters as much as how you sell it!
1. Lack of adequate knowledge
Inexperience can occur in instances where you as a marketing professional or your team of professionals are unable to carry out a successful marketing campaign because they lack adequate knowledge on how to carry it out.
2. Poor marketing strategies
Failure to come up with workable marketing strategies that will enable you to succeed in the campaign. For example, using the wrong marketing channel or the use of the wrong language as your catch phrase. Another example is the failure to segment your market in order to know how to reach your target market.
3. Lack of adequate product knowledge
This is a clear indication that the marketer is not experienced in what he or she is doing. An experienced marketer understands the product he or she is trying to market. He or she needs to know what the product is all about and has answers to some of the questions that might be asked by a customer.
Failing to measure expenditure and ROI
An experienced marketer understands that for every marketing expenditure, there has to be a return on investment. If you do not factor in ROI, you will be making losses. A marketing campaign has to bring in customers and boost your sales. If this does not happen, then the marketing campaign was a complete failure.
Ways you can handle lack of experience in marketing:
1. Training
To ensure that you are well versed with marketing strategies and creating a marketing plan, you need to train your team or get further training as a marketer. You might be using outdated strategies that will not yield results. By engaging in some marketing training programs you will understand what is needed, what will work and what will not work.
Be sure to measure the effectiveness of training, and try to diversify your training strategies. Hiring a guest speaker, enrolling employees in an online course, or having a senior member of your team hold a seminar are good ways to simultaneously engage employees and help them learn new skills.
2. Partnering with other marketing agencies
If your marketing team is not getting the best results, you can consider partnering with another marketing agency and allow your team to get coaching and lessons from that agency. Additionally, this will help set expectations and high standards for your team, who can learn from more experienced members and adopt processes that work for the partnering agency.
Creating a strategic partnership is good for your business as a whole, as well as your marketing department.
3. Research
Additionally, if your team is struggling with a marketing strategy for a certain product, try taking a research approach. Talk to developers and sales representatives within your company about the product. What are features that excite them? What are features that intrigue clients?
Get as much relevant information as you can about the product before you create marketing content for it. If your marketing team does not have adequate product knowledge, this can present an enormous issue. While you don’t necessarily have to know every detail about specific products you are marketing, it is important to get a new perspective of the product– especially if you’re stuck.
Final Thoughts
Marketing is essentially the lifeblood of every business. Without it, it would be difficult to attract customers and convey message and purpose to your target audience.
A lack of experience isn’t an uncommon issue that marketing departments have on their team. Luckily, employees can be trained, and department leaders can make purposeful strides to help their employees gain a better knowledge of their craft.
By identifying your issues and determining the best solution, marketing departments can turn inexperienced employees into well-trained and learning-oriented marketers who know how to run a successful marketing campaign.
Pattern
You must have systems in place that will enable you to track the ROI for any marketing campaign that you undertake.
Regardless of the timeline of the marketing campaign, you must be able to track the value each dollar spent is bringing back to the company because of each advertisement, initiative, or design.
Why are we emphasizing the importance of tracking marketing ROI so much? Does it truly matter, if in the end more customers are attracted to your business?
It’s important because marketing campaigns don’t always end up succeeding. If a marketing campaign you spent time and money on doesn’t end up bringing any value to the business, it’s important for everyone on the team to realize that and shift gears.
Recognizing where the value is coming from can help you avoid falling into the same mistakes over and over again, and help you develop a stronger, more effective marketing strategy. It could be that the marketing campaign isn’t reaching the right target audience, or not enough time and effort went into the marketing content. Whatever the case, the way you would catch these mistakes is by determining the marketing ROI.
Marketing is not cheap and a good marketing campaign will cost you a significant amount of money. Before engaging in any marketing campaign you must do research to establish whether it is necessary to go ahead with the campaign or not. You need to establish systems that will enable you to get value for the money used on the campaign (ROI).
Playbook to handle this problem
There are various solutions to this problem. Here are some of the methods to deal with an issue of inability to prove the marketing ROI of a campaign.
Use Google Analytics
For those individuals who have an online presence and want to know whether their marketing efforts are making an impact, you need to use Google Analytics. This is a small JavaScript that will enable you to make things like conversion funnels and has a plethora of features that will enable you to track the performance of your marketing campaign.
This gives teams the metrics they need to determine which of their marketing efforts succeeding and which are performing too poorly to justify spending money on.
Use promotion codes and discounts
If you want to track offline marketing efforts, you can use domains that are specifically designed to redirect potential customers to your website. Then ensure that you have promotion codes and discounts that will entice the prospects to visit your site and see what you have in store for them. If you use TV or radio as your mode of advertisement, you need to use a promotion code with the service provider and give the user something back for their inclusion of that promotion code.
Your ability to track and measure the return on investment for your marketing campaign will ensure that you do not make losses in the long run. You need to ensure that there is value for every dollar spent on the marketing process of either the business or product.
To track important components of your business and ensure that you’re reaching your goals, you can also implement an OKR software. OKRs– or, Objectives and Key Results– help companies reach their ambitious goals by using measurable and trackable targets to get them from where they are now to where they want to be. OKRs provide companies with focus, alignment, commitment, and make even the biggest goals achievable. Using an OKR software such as Profit.co can help you track the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns as well as the ROI with ease.