Breaking Down Barriers: 6 Common Marketing Campaign Mistakes
Even with good ideas and a substantial budget, some marketing campaigns fall flat. Learn how to avoid these pitfalls.
By Colleen Ringer
What separates a great marketing campaign from a mediocre one? Is it just the cleverness of the concept, the heft of the ad spend or something else?
While strong creative and financial investment are important, there’s more to it than that. Marketing campaigns with strong ROI are built on the foundation of a sound strategy. We’ve helped a lot of organizations, healthcare systems, universities and destination marketing organizations (DMOs) market their offerings through seasonal and always-on campaigns and have found that there are a few big ways that organizations can hinder their own success. Here’s what to watch out for.
Barrier 1: Lack of Clear Goals
You’re probably already tracking some KPIs (key performance indicators) within your organization. Website visits. Newsletter signups. Time on site. But if you fail to home in on which KPIs are most important for your particular campaign, you may be hindering its success.
Perhaps you’re running a seasonal marketing campaign to encourage overnight stays to your destination during shoulder season. Plan out what KPIs will facilitate that goal, and then consider the following: You need to attract clicks while watching the bounce rate to ensure users are engaged. You want users to spend time consuming content, but this engagement needs to reflect high intent to visit.
Spell out the metrics that you’re choosing to prioritize, and then set your flight dates, ad creative and distribution strategy around those goals so every part of your campaign drives users in the same direction. For help setting up consistent conversions in Google Ads or Analytics, check out this explainer from Search Engine Journal.
Barrier 2: Not Managing Expectations
This is an issue of institutional communication. If you’re in charge of the campaign, you need to set realistic benchmarks so your leadership can contextualize your campaign’s performance. Before the campaign launches, gather analytics from past campaigns with similar audiences, timing or budget. Find out the industry standard performance on the platforms you plan to use. With data-informed expectations, you’ll be in a better position to justify the investment — and to strut your stuff when the campaign exceeds its goals.
When C/A was tapped to redesign Cal Alumni Association’s website, we began with a comprehensive discovery phase to analyze past performance, interview stakeholders and audit existing content. We then prepared a content strategy to lay out clear goals for each aspect of the new site. As a result, when the site relaunched, we saw a 12% increase in average sessions per user and a 5% increase in average pages per user — showing that users could now more easily navigate to the content that interested them.
Barrier 3: An Insular Perspective
Sometimes a team member will see a powerful campaign run by a competitor and want to do something similar, even if the concept doesn’t make sense for your organization. Or maybe you’re working on a campaign that runs every year — like a giving day — and there is internal pressure to keep things the same.
It can be hard to weigh the pros and cons of various approaches to a campaign, especially when the same handful of voices are the ones setting priorities year after year. This is where an agency partner can provide invaluable support. An agency that you trust can serve as an external sounding board, and it can bring experience with new advertising platforms and a fresh approach to creative, helping your campaign make a strong impression on a new range of audiences. In our work with The Ritz-Carlton, we saw an opportunity to inspire and engage travelers through the brand’s content hub, Journey. In just the first three months, this content program resulted in $364,000 in direct revenue/bookings.
Barrier 4: Conflicting Stakeholder Visions
A 2023 report from Gallup cites unclear expectations at work as one of the biggest contributors to employee disengagement. If you’re in a leadership position, you should make it a priority to present a clear vision for your team.
No one person can be expected to single-handedly resolve differences in strategy between key stakeholders. You can, however, facilitate clearer communication so the differences become (as Mr. Rogers would say) mentionable and, therefore, manageable.
Here, again, another perspective can be useful, since an agency can make a more objective recommendation informed by research and analytics. With a more refined marketing strategy, your team will be more empowered to do their jobs well.
Barrier 5: Confusing Messaging and Conversion Pathways
Once you get down to designing campaign creative, keep in mind that your message needs to be consistent to be effective. If you are designing a mini-site or clever out-of-home campaign, your branding doesn’t have to be identical to that of your main site, but the colors, fonts and design have to feel similar to the brand users already know. In the same vein, trendy, meme-inspired social media content won’t help you make inroads with a Gen Z audience if the rest of your organization doesn’t cater to those users.
The principle of consistency also applies to the end-to-end user journey. If a user sees an ad on Meta, will they feel baited-and-switched when they click the ad and land on your page? Does your landing page facilitate the action you want them to take? In Salesforce’s 2023 “State of the Connected Customer” report, 80% of customers said that their experience with a company was as important as the services or products provided. By that measure, if any stage of the process is muddy, you’ll lose users and end up with little to show for all your hard work.
Barrier 6: Lack of Optimization
You’ve reached launch day, and your campaign is firing on all cylinders. Time to sit back and relax … right?
Sorry, but there’s still work to do! If you’re running a pay-per-click campaign, you’ll want to regularly monitor performance throughout the campaign flight, pull spend away from underperforming keywords and add in new ones as opportunities arise. Google estimates that real-time ad optimization can result in a 14% median increase in conversions. For social media campaigns, you’ll need to keep a watchful eye on comments, shares and DMs to see how your audience is responding. Check traffic to see if there are any dips that might indicate broken links or platform glitches. And if your campaign includes any A/B test elements — such as two versions of an email in a drip campaign — you’ll want to lock in the top-performing version of creative if there’s a clear winner.
Are You Making the Most of Your Marketing Strategy?
We can help you fully harness the power of content, display advertising, search engine marketing, social media and more to drive quality traffic to your site.
Colleen has worked with clients large and small for more than a decade as a writer, editor and content strategist. She has managed content marketing programs for national and global brands, including hospital systems, universities and nonprofits. Before entering the world of content marketing, Colleen lived in the land of magazine publishing and wrote about architecture, design and travel.
As a mother of a video game-obsessed son, Colleen spends part of her free time learning about Fortnite and the other part trying to recruit her son to root for the Arizona Cardinals. She loves a good book, a strong iced tea and when her Fantasy Football team is winning.