#any typos are my own... word skipped straight past em!

[aranarumei]

the anomalous agate (part four)

hello, all. we've made it to the home stretch! this is the last main chapter of the anomalous agate—there's an epilogue after this, as well as bonus extra set more in the world of hanzawa to tashiro. I've also been playing around with the idea of doing a sort of… director's commentary? something like that. where I get to indulge and talk about some of my thoughts.

for anyone who has no idea what this is about, go here for part one

for those who do, here's the ao3 link, and if you prefer tumblr, it's just under the cut

case 2-x: the anomalous agate (part 4)

Sunlight set the streets before me aglow. It was, by all accounts, the warmest day in autumn we’d had this year, and I was beginning to sweat. There was a restless kind of itch inside my skin that I couldn’t seem to quell. Part of it was the bruise—the mark had faded, but now the area of pale purple felt consistently irritated. 

The other part was the fact that it was Saturday afternoon. Richard had closed the shop to make a special house call, and it was only now that I realized I’d spent the majority of every weekend working in Ginza. Rather than feel like I was chomping at the bit, though, the sudden free time left my skin itching to head into Jewelry Étranger like always. 

After poring over my various options, I’d decided to spend my day off on various chores and errands. I was currently on my way to the supermarket, but in the absence of any attractive deals awaiting me, I was dragging my feet in the afternoon heat. While looking around for a reasonable distraction, my attention was waylaid by the sight of the café I’d entered just over a week ago, and after considering its merit as a temperature-controlled room as well as my flagging enthusiasm for shopping, I decided to enter. 

The moment I stepped inside, a cooling breeze swept over my skin, and I was immediately refreshed. Then I scanned for a free seat and caught sight of a familiar head of black hair. A chill skittered up my spine; the person in question turned around and froze the moment our eyes met. 

Hanzawa Masato’s mouth parted in an involuntary ‘O’ shape, and I knew, again, that I was bearing witness to a scene I shouldn’t have seen. I thought about tucking myself into a different corner of the café, but the person he was sitting with had already spotted me, and obliviously waved me over. 

Hanzawa’s companion was a boy with half-dyed hair, the natural dark brown color abruptly transitioning into a sharp blond-gold. In the time it had taken me to approach them, he’d moved to sit next to Hanzawa, leaving a free seat for me on the other side. I took the offered seat awkwardly, wondering if there was any normal way to introduce myself. 

Thankfully, Hanzawa took the lead in greeting me. “…It’s nice to see you, Seigi.” 

“…It’s nice to see you too, Hanzawa.” As shocked as he’d been when we’d first made eye contact, he didn’t look irritated or out of sorts. I addressed the person next to him. “And you are…?” 

“Tashiro Gonzaburou! Is it fine if I call you Seigi, too?” 

“Sure,” I said, a little stunned by his easygoing smile. “It’s nice to meet you, Tashiro.” 

Before we could get too deep into a conversation, I ordered an iced americano. Hanzawa took a careful sip of his milk tea—it wasn’t the kind that Richard liked, but I wondered if that was why Hanzawa had asked for the royal milk tea in our first meeting. 

Once I’d gotten my drink in hand, Tashiro asked, “So how’d you meet Hanzawa-senpai, anyways?” 

Before I could muster up a vague enough answer that would satisfy a guy who seemed wholly blunt and direct, Hanzawa cut in with a response. “Seigi works at a jewelry store in Ginza,” he said. He addressed me: “I was under the impression you worked weekends?” 

There wasn’t a hint of turmoil on his face. I thought I’d gotten better at reading him, but I had no idea what he was thinking at the current moment. The circumstances through which I’d met Kaede were kind of awkward, so maybe it wasn’t right to explain… but it wasn’t like these were non-awkward circumstances, either. 

“Oh—well, yeah, that’s normally the case,” I said. “But Richard’s making a house call today, so the shop’s closed… we’ll be open tomorrow, though.” That was at least double the words necessary for an explanation. It wasn’t like Hanzawa was going to show up and buy something—he didn’t need me to prattle on about the exact specifics of Jewelry Étranger’s schedule. 

“A jeweler’s store?” Tashiro mused out loud before clapping his hands in epiphany. “Hanzawa-senpai, were you buying earrings?” 

“…Perhaps?” I’d seen Hanzawa be reticent with information before, but the tone of his voice here was an obvious tease. 

With a put-upon sigh, Tashiro asked, “I guess you’re just allergic to straight answers, huh?” At Hanzawa’s answering smile, he added, “Are you finally going to tell me how many piercings you actually have?” 

Hanzawa seemed to consider it for a long time, before simply declaring, “That’s no fun—I’ll let you keep guessing.” 

For all that I’d worried about an awkward situation, Hanzawa and Tashiro were more than able to carry conversation. Rather than cultivate a sense of unease, Hanzawa’s air of mystery had turned into something almost playful, something which Tashiro’s presence seemed to actively encourage. The two people sitting across from me both carried an inherent kind of charm—from Tashiro, so natural he likely didn’t notice it himself, and a deep, practiced consideration from Hanzawa’s end. I would have been fine just watching them talk to each other, but Hanzawa took note of my sense of distance and conscientiously pulled me into a discussion about various customers that had passed through Jewelry Étranger. We began to trade stories about the interesting people we’d encountered—Hanzawa had stories about almost anything, and Tashiro helped out at a bathhouse near his home that was full of interesting characters. 

Still, I couldn’t help but feel the sense that I was a third wheel in this situation. 

During a lull in the conversation, Tashiro tilted Hanzawa’s drink towards him and took an exploratory sip. “You got a new flavor,” he observed. “Don’t you usually stick with the same one?” 

Hanzawa’s gaze lowered towards Tashiro, slumped forward on the table in the perfect picture of relaxation, Hanzawa’s drink in hand. He tilted his drink back towards him and took a sip. “It is college,” he said. “I think you’re meant to loosen up a little.”

“And have all-night karaoke sessions?” Tashiro replied with a laugh. He straightened back up in his seat, not once breaking eye contact with Hanzawa, and added, “You’ve never really been uptight, anyways.” 

Hanzawa raised an eyebrow. “I was president of the disciplinary committee, you know.” 

“Hirano-senpai was vice-president,” Tashiro replied scathingly. 

I had no idea what that name meant, but seeing as Hanzawa’s lips twitched in amusement, it was an excellent point. 

“Anyways, you weren’t uptight, you were up in everything!” Tashiro exclaimed. With his brows scrunched in concentration, he began to count a list of Hanzawa’s activities on his fingers. “President of the disciplinary committee, captain of the ping pong club, head of the dorm, all the random stuff you did for the cultural festival that you’re still doing…” He punctuated his list with a dramatic huff. “I was right—you are a masochist. I bet that hasn’t changed in college.” 

On second thought, maybe the ability to carry a conversation didn’t exactly mean one was a good conversationalist. I didn’t know how to look at the two of them without feeling embarrassment, but strangely enough, Hanzawa didn’t seem to mind the impropriety.

His lips curled into a threatening smile. “Tashiro-kun, are you sure you want to repeat that?” 

At the deep fondness hidden in his voice, I had a sudden epiphany. Blankly staring at Tashiro, I knew—this has to be what that guy meant. 

Unaffected by Hanzawa’s words, and unaware of the whirling thoughts in my head, Tashiro simply muttered, “This is exactly what I mean.” 

“How is the ping pong club, anyways?” Hanzawa asked, confirming my suspicions as he pivoted topics.

Tashiro flashed him a peace sign. “Doing great! The guys in our year keep telling stories about you—that’s how they terrify the first years!” 

“And I’m sure you’ve let them know that these are terribly unfair rumors?” Hanzawa said, leaning towards him. He fluttered his eyelashes, the action dancing on the edge of mockery and sincerity. “Disparaging a poor alumnus who can’t even defend himself, really…” 

Before he could get too far in his speech, they both seemed to realize there was a third person at the table and jerked back into regular sitting positions. Hanzawa ineffectually cleared his throat, and said, “Ah, Seigi—you used to be in a karate club, right? Don’t you still keep in touch with the members?” 

“…Well, not any of the newer ones, really,” I said, doing my best to convey that I hadn’t seen anything incriminating. “But I help out in events every once in a while, and I’m on an email chain with a bunch of people I knew at the time. It would be hard to pick it back up all of sudden, but I’ve been considering it.”

Hanzawa’s eyes flickered over to my fading bruise. He opened his mouth as if to ask me a question, and then seemed to think better of it.

“I did karate for a year, actually!” Tashiro piped up. 

Genuine disbelief and interest bled into Hanzawa’s voice. “Really?” 

“Closer to half a year, probably,” Tashiro amended sheepishly. “But yeah, I cycled through a lot of different sports back then, so I know the basics. Maybe I would’ve picked it back up in high school, but then I got conned—” 

“You bore the consequence of terms you accepted, you mean,” Hanzawa cut in. 

“Conned,” Tashiro repeated with extra emphasis, “into joining the ping pong club. But karate requires a lot of discipline, so I probably wouldn’t have ever stuck with it for long.” He sighed. “Now that I’m the president of the ping pong club, I can’t even skip practices!” 

“Well, obviously,” Hanzawa drawled. With a lightly accusing finger pointed at Tashiro’s hair, he added, “Unfortunately, I only hear good things about you from your clubmates. They don’t even think your hair makes you look like a ruffian!” 

“I haven’t dyed my hair in two years because of that stupid rule!” Tashiro replied. “Seriously, what was that president thinking…” 

“Probably that you’d grow your hair out and then cut off all the dyed parts,” Hanzawa replied dryly.

“No way,” Tashiro said. “Besides, this is kind of my brand now, anyways.”

“Delinquency?”

Tashiro glared at him. “If only he knew your hair was dyed,” he griped, “then I bet he’d—” He paused in the middle of his complaint and peered at Hanzawa’s unchanging expression. “He knew?”

“Well, my hair doesn’t stand out like yours does.” 

“So what?” Tashiro asked. “Just because you look normal doesn’t mean you are.” 

Hanzawa ruffled his hair in retaliation. “Show some respect for your senpai,” he huffed. Ignoring Tashiro’s squawks of protest, he added, “Besides, we didn’t force you to dye your hair back to brown, right?” With his hand still near Tashiro’s hair, he curled a stray stand around his finger. “Has your hair been growing much longer recently?��

“Yeah,” Tashiro said, smoothing his hair back into submission. “I think I damaged my hair pretty badly when bleaching it, so it grew kind of slowly, but recently that hasn’t been the case. I don’t know why, but it’s useful for now, isn’t it? I might not even need a wig.” 

“…A wig?” I ventured. 

Pink dusted Hanzawa’s cheeks. “I—I forgot… that you wouldn’t know,” he finished smoothly, though I had a hunch what he meant to say was I forgot you were there. I’d feel offended if it wasn’t for the fact that this meant that Hanzawa had drastically lowered his guard around me.

“It’s alright,” I said. “Is the wig for your cultural festival?” 

“You know about that?” Tashiro asked. 

“I heard a little about your… cross-dressing competition?” 

“It’s officially termed a beauty contest,” Hanzawa said, “but unofficially… no one calls it that.” 

“That’s cool,” I said lamely, but maybe Tashiro had picked up on the sincerity in my voice because he blinked at me for a few moments before beginning to motormouth. 

“Hanzawa-senpai’s helping me out!” he exclaimed. For the first time since we’d met, he ducked his head out of shyness. “It’s—for this year, I’m participating… some guys wanted me to do it in my first year, but I refused to, and well, I’m way taller than I was back then so it’s kind of weird, but still—I think it could be kind of fun? And it turns out that a lot of making things look good is in costuming and makeup, which I don’t know anything about, but of course Hanzawa does because he creepily knows everything, right?” He paused, and added, “For that bruise on your face, he could probably help you out there, if you wanted?”

“Oh—he already did, actually,” I said. “I learned how to cover it up when it was way too obvious to go to work, but I didn’t want to bother, otherwise.”

“Of course, he’s amazing,” Tashiro said, like it was a natural law of the universe, and Hanzawa stared, spellbound. “I don’t know how anyone’s going to pull off anything good next year because he’s got things so well-handled. It should really be impossible for a human to actually do that much”—he turned to Hanzawa and glared without much heat—“so maybe actually rest some time, would you?”

Slipping back into his regular grace, Hanzawa gestured at the café. “Isn’t this resting?” 

“It’s—I don’t mind that you’re helping,” Tashiro said, a frustrated edge to his voice. “I’m happy about it; I just need you to be, too.”

Hanzawa’s gaze drifted to an aimless point in the air. “Don’t worry about that,” he said, voice a little strangled. “I’m… going to stop by the restroom before we head out.”

With that said, he glided towards a distant corner of the café. Tashiro’s eyes tracked his back as he moved, and once Hanzawa left his line of sight, he studied me with careful eyes. 

There wasn’t any pressure behind it, but I couldn’t look away. 

Tapping his empty drink against the table, Tashiro said, “Like he said, we’ll probably head out soon.” His voice had dropped in both pitch and volume. “You seem like a good guy, Seigi—it was nice to meet you.”

“Likewise.”

“Since that’s the case… he jokes about it, but if you run into Hanzawa-senpai again, could you make sure he’s not actually running himself into the ground?” 

Caught by the sincerity and intensity of his request, I agreed without a second thought. “Sure.” Then I realized it wasn’t the kind of promise I could meaningfully keep, but I didn’t know how to clarify my inadequacy.

“I seriously mean it,” Tashiro whispered, “a guy like that has to be a masochist for how much work he takes on. I mean, he’s helping me even though he graduated already…” 

It wasn’t the kind of thing I could say to his face, but I had a feeling that Hanzawa didn’t consider helping Tashiro as work. Hanzawa was only a year younger than me—maybe not even that, since I didn’t actually know his birthday—and so Tashiro was two years younger than me at best, but I couldn’t help but feel a rush of odd assuredness at the fact. Looking at him, I could understand, a little, what Richard had meant by saying that non-interference was sometimes the respectable choice.

When Hanzawa returned, he raised an eyebrow at the slightly somber mood of the table—Tashiro staring at his empty drink, and I, lost in my thoughts. “I’m going to assume you started gossiping behind my back,” he said. 

Rather than lie, Tashiro dismissively waved off his statement and said, “I told him to look out for you, since you’re up to something or the other. The moment you’re out of my sight, you’re doing all of these interesting things I don’t even know about…”

Stunned by his frankness, Hanzawa’s reply was stilted. “It’s… only expected, I suppose. That I can’t be around as much anymore.” 

“It’s not a bad thing,” Tashiro clarified. “It’s just a thing. Drag me around sometime when you go on your strange adventures, would you?”

“…I’ll consider it, okay?” Hanzawa said, gentler than I’d ever heard him, and I knew, surer than anything, that those weren’t empty words.

With Tashiro appeased, Hanzawa and I locked eyes.

There were a lot of things that I wanted to say. That more than ever, I felt that lapis lazuli was a perfect stone for him. That he was absolutely capable of grandness and importance. That Hanzawa carried different aspects of himself like he was a living example of metamorphism. But seeing him like this was the exact reason I couldn’t say anything to him. Today, we hadn’t spoken a single word about his visits to Jewelry Étranger, but I’d never felt the pressure to. Each time I’d met with Hanzawa, he’d been on his back foot—navigating his interactions with Richard and I at Jewelry Étranger, worrying over Kaede, or helping me cover my bruise.

But here, without any jewel in his possession, there was someone that recognized Hanzawa as he was. Maybe, then, he didn’t need anything at all.

Tashiro had asked me to look out for Hanzawa, but really, it was the other way around—I just never had to ask. Though there was a lot I didn’t know, I had the feeling that Hanzawa and I were similar types of people. If someone saw us as special, it would be impossible to let go.

I swallowed down all those presumptuous words, and said, “Have a nice day.”

“…You too, Seigi.”

— — —

Three weeks later, I was making a cursory sweep of the Jewelry Étranger floor, watching the clock tick over to closing time, when the door swung open with a blast of frost. 

In swept Hanzawa Masato. He was wearing the same shade of pale blue he’d worn during his first visit, but he’d opted for a warm turtleneck instead of a light sweater. He’d layered it with a soft brown coat, but his face was still tinged pink from the cold.

The door clicked shut behind him. I felt as if the broom in my hands should have clattered to the floor, but it stayed in my grip.

Even though it was our duty to greet a client, it was Hanzawa that broke the silence first. “I wasn’t sure if I’d be interrupting something,” he said. Something about his demeanor was noticeably different—he didn’t look uncomfortable, but he wasn’t speaking with his usual practiced composure, either.

I glanced toward Richard—he kept a cool face, but there was a slight deer-in-the-headlights look in his eyes that he hadn’t yet shaken off. 

“You’re not interrupting,” I said, leaning my broom against the nearest wall. “Feel free to take a seat.”

“Hanzawa-san…” Richard began, before he fully collected himself. “It’s nice to hear from you again. Would you like me to bring out what you’d looked at previously?”

“I’ll make tea—” I offered, but Hanzawa stopped me in my tracks.

“There’s no need,” he said. “It shouldn’t take too long.” He took a deep breath, drawing closer without taking a seat. “To answer your question, Richard-san—you mentioned you carried different kinds of agate, yes?” At Richard’s ensuing nod, he said, “Do you carry any earrings with blue lace agate, then?” 

Professionalism snapped Richard back into action. “We do have a few,” he said, rising from his seat. “I’ll be back out in a moment, then.”

Once Richard had disappeared into a back room, Hanzawa offered me an appeasing smile. “I’m sure all these repeated visits are bad for business, but I do actually plan on making a purchase.”

“Richard treats all of his clients sincerely, whether they purchase something or not,” I said in instinctive defense. Maybe my next words weren’t appropriate for an employee to a client, but I’d run into Hanzawa outside of work twice. “Honestly, I wasn’t sure you’d be back. Even though we ran into each other again…” 

“I wasn’t planning on it, then,” Hanzawa admitted. “So I do appreciate that you didn’t pressure me.”

“What changed?” I asked. 

“I won’t ruin all my mystery,” Hanzawa replied, a little flippant, and I was reminded of the lightness with which he and Tashiro had conversed. “But the simplest explanation is that I figured out what I wanted.” At my blank stare, he laughed, and explained, “I liked the lapis lazuli. But something so ostentatious won’t ever be my style. I said I wanted a statement piece, right? This is one��but it’s a statement to me, not someone else.” He gestured towards his sweater. “And it’s this shade of blue. I do like blue.”

What I’d noticed earlier was the difference between composure and confidence—the latter of which was unmistakable in Hanzawa’s voice.

“If you’re happy with your choice, that’s great,” I said.

In lieu of a proper reply, Hanzawa said, “…If you ever feel like hanging out sometime, Seigi, you do have my number.”

I didn’t give a proper reply, either; Richard returned with his collection of blue lace agate.

There were only three pairs of earrings, so he offered to have a stone worked into jewelry if Hanzawa preferred. Despite his initial hurry, Hanzawa took the time to inspect each set of earring as carefully as he’d studied eyeshadows. Finally, he decided that Richard’s offer wasn’t necessary, and picked out a pair of teardrop-shaped earrings.

“Can I wear these out of the shop?” Hanzawa asked as Richard advised him on the best way to store jewelry. After brushing past his annoyance at the interruption, Richard gave the okay, and so Hanzawa carefully tried them on, closing the back with a soft click.

After making his goodbyes, he paused by the opened door. In the next moment, he whipped back around to face me, displaying a brilliant, evanescent smile. Against all odds, he’d found a way to glow beneath the gray winter sky.

Just outside the door, I caught a glimpse of a green hoodie, and heard a familiar voice. “Your ears!” 

Startled, Hanzawa turned and closed the door behind him, but I caught his response just before the door swung shut. “My earrings, Tashiro-kun. Really, it’s rude to point…” 

As if on cue, the clock ticked over to closing time. I wasn’t sure when I’d see Hanzawa Masato again, but I knew—whatever conversation he was about to have, it wasn’t one he’d run from.

[onewaywardwitch]

Just A Typo (2/?)

Pairing: Bucky Barnes x Hacker!Reader

Summary: It was a simple challenge between a very competitive group of friends. A challenge that ended very differently than anticipated.

Warnings: Just a bit of language

Word Count: 2140

A/N: Ahhh the feedback on part 1 was amazing! Thank you all so much! Here’s part 2!

There are moments in your life when you know you’ve screwed up. Like when you decide to try the new Starbucks coffee, only to realise it’s as horrible as you predicted, and you’ve wasted €5. Or when you spend all night binge-watching some show on Netflix when you know you’ve got to get up early for work the next morning. Or when you agree to hack into one of the world’s best security systems to fuel your own ego and diminish your friend’s one. And while I've found myself in the first two situations many times, the third was a new one for me.

“I promise to visit you at least once a month when you get sent to Alcatraz,” Becca sang as she all but skipped into Angie’s apartment to join the rest of us. I laughed sarcastically.

“Sent to Alcatraz for hacking? Crime expectations must be low lately if they’re sending hackers there.”

“I’m sure Tony Stark has some pull in the government to get you put away there. You know, when you get caught,” she gloated. It was obvious she thought I was heading down the same route as Sophie. Her confidence only made me want to prove her wrong even more.

Angie ignored our seemingly never-ending banter and carried on setting up my laptop and other work necessities.

“I still don’t understand why you have to have a pack of Haribo with you every time you do something illegal,” she sighed, glaring at me as I stood with Becca.

“Well it’s just common sense, Angie. I can’t have chocolate, it’ll get all over my hands. Biscuits leave crumbs everywhere and hot chocolate is a recipe for disaster,” I replied, keeping my face as straight as I could.

“No, I don’t get why you need sweets at all!”

“That’s a stupid question. You always need sweets. We can’t all live off boiled vegetables and whole-grain everything.”

Angie just looked at Becca in defeat, who shrugged her shoulders.

“Hey, if I get the job done, who cares what I eat?” I strutted over to the table that had my laptop on it. Unfortunately, my confident walk did nothing to ease my nerves as my friends watched on eagerly.

 ~~~~~

“Becca, I swear to Thor if you breathe on my neck again, I’ll break yours,” I snapped. Becca and Angie shared a nervous glance while I typed furiously, the lines and lines of code beginning to make me dizzy.

“Y/N, you’ve proven your point. Your brilliant. A mastermind. A true gift to the hacking community. You can quit now, it’s alright.” Becca was beginning to regret ever provoking me when she saw how much more advanced Stark’s system was compared to the systems we would normally attack for a laugh.

I could sense Angie about to open her mouth when the screen suddenly went blank and the three of us froze where we were; Becca leaning over my shoulder, Angie holding her third cup of herbal tea, and me with jelly rings on each of my extremely tired fingers.

The screen flashed once, before several different boxes popped up. It took each of us about seven seconds to realise we were looking at the feed from the security cameras placed around Avengers Tower.

“Holy shit,” whispered Angie.

“I am the greatest and I’m completely unappreciated in my time,” I grinned, my eyes flickering from each small screen.

“IS THAT BLACK WIDOW?”

“Agh! Becs, inside voice please.” Becca refused to acknowledge my complaint. Her gaze was fixated on the image of the Natasha Romanoff eating what I guessed was-

“A poptart! I have those all the time, we’re practically soulmates!” Becca exclaimed.

As Angie tried to explain to Becca that her comment was only a bit unrealistic, I gazed at each of screens on my laptop. Who would have thought that the Falcon would be spending his day holding something shiny while running away from a very angry, one-armed Winter Soldier? Or that Hawkeye drinks milk straight from the carton and puts it back in the fridge when no one’s looking?

Just as Becca started to talk about the Black Widow’s hair (“I could never pull off the red like she does!”), the laptop flashed black, before more lines of code began popping up again.

“Oh shit, we’re busted. Angie, gummy bear, now,“ I demanded, quickly returning to my state of concentration (which was difficult after seeing Captain America lifting weights). Angie grabbed the bag and put one of the bears in my mouth, only for me to spit it out in disgust.

“Not a yellow one, a red! I'm not a monster,” I yelped before turning back to the task at hand. Nervously chewing on the nicest flavoured gummy bear, I attempted to keep up with Stark’s excellent security.

“Make sure you can’t be traced. Keep the IP address hidden and get out,” I heard Angie mutter behind me. After a couple of minutes, I felt myself relax, watching the screen change to my regular background of the Supernatural cast.

“We are out and I’m going to go down in history as the greatest hacker that ever existed.” I spun in my chair, grinning at the girls as my confidence rose again. “I just hacked into Avengers Tower, admired Captain America’s incredibly toned body for a bit, before successfully leaving without giving away my location or any way for them to trace me. How was that for you Becca?”

She looked at me, a small smile growing on her face. “I'm impressed, Y/N. Shame Sophie’s not here so you could gloat to her too, but that was pretty awesome.”

“I can’t believe you pulled that off,” Angie said admirably, her herbal tea long forgotten on the nearby countertop. I winked at her and held out the nearly empty bag of Haribos.

“Yellow gummy bear anyone?”

 ~~~~~

Tony Stark was busy doing nothing in his lab with Dr Banner when F.R.I.D.A.Y. announced that someone was hacking into their system.

“Well what are you waiting for F.R.I.D.A.Y.? Flush ‘em out. And get their location.”

“Sir, they’ve already broke down our firewalls and accessed our cameras.”

That caught Tony’s attention. He looked at Bruce confusedly before again telling F.R.I.D.A.Y. to get whoever it was out of their system using whatever means necessary. As the A.I. was occupied with that, he called all the Avengers to the briefing room.

 ~~~~~

“Barnes, if you could stop murdering Wilson with your eyes for just five minutes so we can start?”

Bucky turned and aimed his glare at Tony instead, still scowling that Sam had somehow managed to steal his arm for nearly half an hour. That man knew all the best hiding places in this tower.

Tony rolled his eyes and clapped his hands together, deciding to get straight to the point. “Nothing to worry about, but someone hacked into the tower and accessed all of the cameras. We don’t know who or why, but F.R.I.D.A.Y.'s nearly got a location, I think.”

The uproar was immediate.

“I thought your security was the best there is!”

“How long have they been watching us?”

“What else have they hacked into?”

Tony grimaced as all the voices overlapped and became louder. His embarrassment that some computer nerd cracked his online defences was obvious from the lack of his usual playful tone and he wasn’t in the mood for messing about now. He opened his mouth but before he could speak, F.R.I.D.A.Y.'s voice rang through the room, effectively shutting everyone up.

“Sir, I believe I have the location of the hacker. It appears they made a slight typing error when concealing their IP address.”

“A typo? Rookie mistake,” Sam mumbled.

“That ‘rookie’ managed to hack into all our cameras pretty quickly,” Bruce stated, looking at Sam pointedly.

“Okay, Cap, take your brooding boyfriend in the corner and bring in whoever it is. It's nowhere near any known HYDRA bases, so my guess? A group of boys hiding out in one of their mom’s basements. Shouldn’t be too difficult.” Steve nodded at Tony and made his way over to Bucky while everyone else left the room, still discussing the infiltrator who was able to beat the great Tony Stark.

 ~~~~~

Steve looked around the apartment in surprise. This was definitely not what they were expecting. The place was clean and lacked any personal touches. That is, if he weren’t including the many Funko Pop figures that were scattered seemingly at random throughout the apartment. He moved towards the laptop that was laying carelessly on the kitchen table.

“Just talked to the landlady,” Bucky said, gesturing towards the front door where a woman in her mid-fifties stood excitedly, trying to catch a glimpse of the great Captain America. Bucky waved his flesh hand at her, hoping she’d get the message to leave them alone. Fortunately for him, one of the neighbours came out and started complaining to her about the thin walls. That made her run off quickly.

“Apartment is owned by a woman in her late twenties, early thirties. She asked to be kept off the books, and your admirer back there had no problem with that because she always paid her rent on time and by cash.”

“Does she have any idea where she could be now?” Steve asked, closing over the front door again so they wouldn’t raise any suspicions.

“She said she left around three hours ago, hopefully to get some food. Her fridge is empty. Except for a tub of ice-cream,” Bucky snorted.

They both stopped talking when they heard the rustling of keys just outside the door. Bucky went to stand beside Steve, who was back beside the laptop. He placed a hand over the gun he always carried in his trousers as the door opened. But he felt himself relax a bit when he heard a familiar tune.

“Is that… Queen?” Steve whispered as the woman began humming to herself. Natasha had taken it upon herself to educate the two veterans on all the music they had missed out on in the past seventy years, including Queen, Michael Jackson, and Adele. This was one of the few songs they actually recognised.

The woman stumbled into the kitchen, struggling to carry all the shopping bags she had tried to carry up in one trip. Her headphones were blaring Bohemian Rhapsody loud enough for the two men to hear clearly. They shared a look of surprise as she still hadn’t noticed them standing a few feet behind her.

 ~~~~~

“But now I’ve gone and thrown it all away,” I sang quietly to myself as I restocked my fridge. I was still on a high from my incredible success with Becca and Angie only a few hours ago. We were going to celebrate with Angie’s cheap champagne, before Becca realised she was about two hours late for work. I left shortly after her to buy more ice-cream, which quickly turned into buying half the grocery store.

“Mama, oooo- OH WHAT THE FUCK!” My dramatic spin while singing didn’t end as well as I had planned. I wasn’t exactly prepared for the two super soldiers who stood by my table, watching me with humour. I tugged my headphones out of my ears and stared at them dumbstruck.

“Captain America… wow such an honour… you’re very… wow. And the Winter Barnes! Oh god, there’s a ‘soldier’ in there somewhere, isn’t there? Very, very… broad.” My voice died off towards the end as the word came out of my mouth too quickly for me to recognise them. The Captain’s eyes sparkled in amusement, while the Winter Soldier was looking at me with interest. He failed to see how this woman caused Stark so much concern.

Captain America opened his mouth to speak, but at that exact moment I coped why two Avengers were standing in my apartment.

“Oh, this is about the whole Avengers Tower thing, isn’t it? The camera, the hacking… I'm not evil! I wasn’t planning on accessing any confidential information and selling it! I don’t do that, I was just messing with friends, I swear!” Apparently, I had lost all control over my own mouth and I confessed to everything without either of the men saying a word. They glanced at each other before Captain Rogers turned back to me.

“You understand we need to bring you in anyway. We have questions you need answer back at the tower.”

I nodded nervously at the pair as they escorted me downstairs to where a car was waiting outside, the Soldier bringing my laptop with him.

“This explains why Nora was in such a good mood when I passed her on the stairs earlier,” I thought to myself. “She never smiles when I pay her my rent, but one visit from America’s golden boy has her skipping to her door!”

[roypstickney]

11 Marketing Experts Share Their Marketing Fails (and Lessons Learned)

If you’ve ever failed in marketing, you’re not alone.

Nobody likes to mess up, but we’ve all been there. And what sets truly remarkable marketers apart from everyone else isn’t that they don’t ever make mistakes. They do. It’s just that they learn from their failures. 

As Barack Obama put it, “You can’t let your failures define you. You have to let your failures teach you.” (Thanks, Obama. No, really. Thank you.) 

With that in mind, we asked 11 experienced marketers to share what they’ve learned from their past blunders. These pros are living proof that we can learn as much from those times things didn’t go our way as we can from our biggest wins. As you’ll see, getting it wrong helped them grow their business, develop a customer-focused philosophy, improve their abilities as a leader, and much more.

So let’s dive right in.

Jump Straight to a Lesson Learned from a Marketing Fail

Target the Right Keywords

Develop Buyer Personas to Inform Your Marketing

Put QA Checks in Place

Add Automated Checks When You QA

Validate New Ideas with Customer Research

Test One Change At a Time

Set Realistic Goals and Expectations

Create Clear Content Briefs

Promote Visibility Within Your Team

Prioritize Projects Based on Potential Impact

Don’t Sell Yourself Short

1. Target the Right Keywords

Every marketer knows the value of organic keywords. Understanding what your target audience is searching for (and how you can rank for specific keywords) can help you optimize your campaigns and develop an effective SEO strategy. 

But what if a piece of content doesn’t rank at all? What if it ends up ten pages deep in the SERPs? What if it forever sinks to the deep Mariana Trench of Google?

Take Andy Crestodina, co-founder of Orbit Media Studios. He spent over 20 hours on a 4,100+ word article (and a 12-minute video) only to have it fail as a piece of organic content. He figured he’d optimize it for a popular phrase, get it to rank, and win a steady stream of traffic. But that never happened. 

Andy owns up to why he failed:

I didn’t dig in deep enough while checking competition. As it turns out, the high ranking pages have huge numbers of inbound links. Even though the difficulty score was low, the linking root domain numbers were off the charts. But I never checked.

Andy learned a powerful lesson: your content won’t rank by magic.

You need to put hard work into targeting the right phrases that can compound traffic over time. To avoid losing your content in Google search obscurity, take the time to research the keywords you want to target first. 

Hit the sweet spot for keywords by researching phrases that have a good mix of search volume, general intent, and popularity among competitors. (Source: Orbit Media)

And don’t just look at search volume. Make sure you check out how your competitors rank to ensure you’re ready to take them on. You want to know if you’re going up against the Mohammed Ali of content before you throw your hat into the ring.

2. Develop Buyer Personas to Inform Your Marketing

Buyer personas go hand-in-hand with your marketing strategy. They’re the needle to your strategy’s thread. The arrow to your bow. The Kim to your Kanye. (You see where I’m going with this.) 

Defining the ideal customer audience you want to attract will help you market to them in the best way possible. However, to build robust, accurate buyer personas, you need one thing: data. 

Early on in his career, Brandon Gains, VP of marketing at MonetizeMore, created personas from gut-feeling alone. He didn’t validate them through qualitative research, surveys, and interviews. And without a formal process to gather internal and external data points, he failed to involve a large customer base in his company’s marketing and product direction. 

But to get internal buy-in from department heads, he needed more than his gut feeling. He needed to fix how his company crafted buyer personas:

We reignited our user research process and developed more of a scientific approach that incorporates internal and external research into concrete deliverables that I use across the company.

Like Brandon says, you need to ground your buyer personas in research and data—a.k.a. the real world (and, no, not the MTV version). Even though it’s nitty-gritty work, setting up customer interviews and internal discussions across your sales, customer success, product, and marketing teams will pay off in the long run. You’ll be able to better determine your objectives and anticipate consumer needs. 

With buyer personas, you can know how to tailor your content to segmented audiences who have different preferences, challenges, and pain points.  (Source: Unbounce)

Like any dynamic duo, buyer personas can also help you create segmented landing pages that speak to different types of visitors. You can use different templates to quickly build customized pages that’ll give them exactly what they’re looking for.

3. Put QA Checks in Place

Quality assurance is one step you should never skip, but it’s also the one you’ll be most tempted to skip. Don’t do it. Resist the urge. QA is key for ensuring a high-performing campaign.

Put yourself in your visitors’ shoes: how would you feel if you clicked on a link that went to a nonexistent page? Frustrated or annoyed? Definitely. Content with typos and broken links can create a bad first impression.

It’s what happened to Scott McLeod, chief of staff at Resident. He learned the hard way about the importance of QAing after running ads to a landing page that didn’t load. (It’s a big no-no considering you need to ensure your site loads as quickly as possible.)

His advice? Be extra mindful to check that you inspect every aspect of your campaign. Or, to put it another (bigger, bolder) way:

You need to provide a seamless user experience for your customers that will make ’em love you. Treat it like a first date: you want to please your prospects from the get-go so they’ll have more reason to want to keep dating you. (And maybe even marry you.) 

We specifically have the team follow from ad to checkout, especially for major sales or mass communications … Creating redundancy in the QA process or review process leads to less mishaps.

When you have ten other things to do, it can be tempting to call something done without going through the crucial last step of QAing it. But ensuring you take this time will save you a lot of headaches in the long run.

4. Add Automated Checks When You QA

While Scott recommends running QA checks, Derric Haynie, chief ecommerce technologist at Ecommerce Tech, takes it one step further. He suggests using automated checks to protect you from tiny errors that can cost you your ad spend. The best marketers do this to provide the best post-click experience from ad to landing page.

This realization didn’t come to Derric immediately, though. It’s something he learned after running a PPC campaign that drove to a dead 404 page. A small oversight that meant throwing $10K down the drain. (In McDonald’s terms, it’s equal to 40,000 Chicken McNuggets. A whole lotta nugs.)

Luckily, Google Ads includes final URLs to help make sure your ads are leading your prospects to the right landing page. Derric uses this field, especially for dynamic ads.

Nowadays, I’m using Google’s ‘Final URL’ column and either copy/pasting or exporting all the URLs to check the final destination works. They now have a landing page validation checker built in.

The Final URL is the address of the page in your website that people reach when they click your ad. (Source: Google)

Incorporate automated QA checks into your process wherever you can. You’ll minimize human error, and might even have some budget left over for a 10-piece McNugget. 

5. Validate New Ideas With Customer Research

These days, data needs to be the driving force behind any marketing strategy. It’s a must-have for any business’s growth and success. (If Obi-Wan Kenobi were a marketer, I’m sure he’d want you to use the data force.) 

But don’t take my word for it. Here’s Google:

Even Google reports that leading marketers believe how they apply their data is crucial to success. (Source: Think with Google)

Ask any great marketer, and they’ll tell you that they don’t make business decisions without the data to back it. It’s a best practice, but one we can easily forget.

Marc Bitanga, Founder & Managing Director at Discoverable Media, almost committed an epic fail because a key stakeholder of a media company was determined to make a drastic change to their website without the data to support it. 

The stakeholder thought the change would lead to a big win. Marc, on the other hand, felt like it wasn’t a good idea. Working with his UX team, he conducted research to confirm his hunch. He recorded real-life feedback sessions with customers to validate the stakeholder’s requirements.

Turns out Marc’s intuition was right: the proposed changes would have led to a bad experience for website visitors. If anything, Marc is a prime example of why research is the key to making informed decisions. And Marc has learned his lesson:

I avoid similar fails today by conducting as much customer research as possible to improve customer centricity.

Remember to keep your customers at the heart of every marketing idea and decision so that you can determine if an idea is viable or not. It’s frequently the difference between crash-and-burn ideas and successful ones.

6. Test One Change at a Time

Great marketing comes from testing, analyzing, and iterating based on results. (It’s an art and a science.) As marketers, we’re always busy pushing campaigns out the door, but we need to remind ourselves not to get in over our heads. When testing, that means taking a step back and making changes one at a time, versus all at once. 

For instance, Casie Gillette, senior director of digital marketing at KoMarketing, redesigned a big website for a client that involved a ton of changes at once. Everything from updating URLs, switching CMS systems, and updating content. Her mistake?

We hadn’t tested moving a site to HTTPS and changing all of the URLs and content at the same time.

The modifications led to a massive loss in qualified traffic and leads all at once, plus a host of pesky technical issues. Casie knew page content revisions and testing were both necessary to improve relevance and ranking. To increase conversions, her team tested on-page tags, created guides to compete in SERPs, and even optimized their landing pages with CTAs, banners, and forms.

It was basically an all-out blitz to find what was working and how to replicate it across the site … It really came down to consistency, testing, and replication.

There’s no magical one-size-fits-all recipe for success. But you can focus your testing efforts rather than tackling everything at once. That way, you can identify what works and what doesn’t. (It’s a testing best practice.)

Keen to grow your conversion rates? With our landing pages, you can experiment on your messaging, page design, and forms to validate ideas and score more conversions with A/B testing.

7. Set Realistic Goals and Expectations

Goals are the building blocks for any marketer. They provide clarity and guidance for when you start putting together a marketing strategy and action plan. But making sure your goals are well-defined and realistic is often easier said than done, especially if you’re ambitious.

Sphoorti Bhandare, PR and content whisperer—yep, you read that right—prepared for a big store launch one month in advance. Despite her proactive planning, though, things started to fall apart one by one a week before they were set to go live.

With little time and no contingency plan, Sphoorti postponed the launch. While not ideal, it did help her realize where she failed:

We hugely underestimated the effort required to make the launch successful and didn’t really write down a crisis communication plan for worst-case scenarios.

Many things can go wrong on a marketing campaign. When you start a new project, ask yourself: do I have the time, resources, and budget I need to accomplish everything? Then set specific, realistic marketing goals and inform everyone of them. 

The biggest lesson I took from this was to set realistic goals and expectations and consistently monitor them. Not only for the marketing team, but for every department, vendor, and executive involved.

Having a crystal clear vision of what you want to achieve can help hold you and your team accountable within a given time frame. If you aren’t able to reach your goals in the end, that’s OK. The beauty of goal-setting is taking a step back and seeing how or where you can improve next time.

(via Isaac Smith on Unsplash)

8. Create Clear Content Briefs

You’ve got your strategy. You’ve got your buyer personas. Now you’ve got to whip together some content that supports this overall strategy and speaks directly to your buyers. Before you do anything, sitting down to create a clear content brief is one of the smartest time investments you can make. 

(Believe me, you’ll thank yourself later.)

The best marketers would agree that a content brief can paint a clear picture for anyone you work with. Taru Bhargava of Foundation Marketing is one of them. 

When she first started out as a content marketer, Taru commissioned freelance writers to contribute long-form articles. To save time, she only provided them with a topic. Little did she know that this approach would backfire. 

Guess what? The lack of a detailed brief resulted in commissioned articles that suffered in quality. And, even more importantly, it turned into an enormous waste of time and effort. Realizing her blunder, Taru now follows a framework to include everything that’s required for someone to know before they create any content—the voice and tone, target audience, competitors, keywords, internal links, and more. 

Sticking to a content brief and overcommunicating the expectations is always a good strategy when working with freelancers … Providing them with as much info as possible in the first go is the best way to avoid the to & fro of edits.

Creating a content brief as your north star helps everyone understand what you want to accomplish with a piece of content. A brief can take the guesswork out of content creation, saving you time and money. 

Taru’s secret is this content writing brief template from CoSchedule. (She swears by it, so you know it’s good.)

9. Promote Visibility Within Your Team

We live in a fast-paced marketing world. Timelines fluctuate. Campaigns change. Requests from different stakeholders come at any given moment. Communicating these changes to every member of your team can be a significant challenge.

For example, Eric Siu, CEO of Single Grain, made a $500K deal to run a promotional campaign for a SaaS company. The problem? He didn’t tell his team, which left everyone scrambling at the last minute when orders started rolling in. Oops. You can imagine his colleagues weren’t too happy.

Eric admits he failed, but shares what he took away from the experience:

I learned that inter-departmental communication is important. It was a marketing fail, yes. But because so much of marketing is evangelizing your own marketing within the company, I lost respect and trust.

Making others aware of the work you’re doing—especially if that work involves them—is the key. When there’s so many tasks on the go, we need to hear something several times before we process it. Be extra clear and overcommunicate, so no one you’re working with gets caught by surprise. Then keep open lines of communication between you and any team you’re working with.

(via youxventures at Unsplash)

10. Prioritize Projects Based on Potential Impact

Managing a laundry list of priorities is probably nothing new to you. You’ve got top-level business objectives, departmental strategic initiatives, and marketing priorities to think about. But selecting the priorities that will have the greatest impact can be very tricky—especially when you have pressure from stakeholders to pursue certain projects.  

Back in 2018, the Unbounce content team wondered if Call to Action Conference might warrant a digital magazine-style recap. We wanted to write recap material to extend the lifespan of the live event. And we were inspired by Montreal’s G2 conference and the amazing, physical print book their organizers use to commemorate the experience.

Excited, the Unbounce team jumped at the chance to create a ‘zine. But, as Unbounce’s Head of Content Marketing, Jennifer Pepper, says, “there were several other content projects I should have prioritized instead. Despite eagerness and stakeholders hoping to squeeze the most reuse out of our live event, there were more pressing content priorities and I should have a) trusted my gut and b) made a more solid case for working on the projects I knew could have a greater overall payoff for the business.”

Call to Action Magazine was filled with curated insights from the 2017 Call to Action Conference.

Want to experience CTAConf this year and raise your marketing IQ? Check out the conference and workshop agenda for September 2019. Tickets are still available.

Jen now prioritizes far more ruthlessly, having learned to advocate for the right work more vocally. Her ultimate takeaway?

If you own prioritization, it’s up to you to uncover the opportunities and make sure you’re making the strongest case to stakeholders on the right stuff to create. As a content lead, it’s about how you can educate stakeholders so they understand why some things are more worthy of your team’s time than others.

11. Don’t Sell Yourself Short

Whether you’re leading a big marketing team or just part of one, it’s easy to get lost in the shuffle. Different experts have different opinions, and not everybody is right 100% of the time. How do you manage them?

Kasey Bayne, head of marketing at DataTrue, faced a difficult situation early in her career. Someone she was working with wanted to break into a new market by doing a big trade show. With no lead time or reputation in that industry (not to mention a very tight budget) Kasey had significant doubts. She voiced her concerns at first, but, against her better judgment, eventually agreed to the move. 

The trade show turned out to be a flop. Kasey learned a valuable lesson nonetheless. “When you are the expert or marketing leader in your team, it’s important to be strong about your recommendations,” she says.

Prepare your case, bring your data, and your experience to present a solid recommendation as best as you can without being so quick to give in to others.

No matter your age or years of experience in the industry, trust your knowledge as a marketer. Don’t be afraid to stand up for yourself and voice your concerns or suggestions. (As Marc Bitanga would say, it’s even better when you’re able to back up those arguments with data.) 

If at First You Fail, Try Again!

Everybody makes mistakes. Everybody has one of those days.

From these 11 examples, we can see how even experienced, expert marketers can fail. (And fail again.) But, crucially, they transform their mistakes into insights about what not to do in the future. 

So if you happen to make a mistake—and you probably will—think of it as a learning opportunity. No need to wrap yourself in a blanket of shame; own your failures and turn them into your own personal ‘aha!’ moment. 

Go on—take chances, make mistakes, and get messy.

You’ll be in great company. 

Have marketing fails you’d like to share? Leave them in the comments below, and let us know what you learned.

[annaxkeating]

11 Marketing Experts Share Their Marketing Fails (and Lessons Learned)

If you’ve ever failed in marketing, you’re not alone.

Nobody likes to mess up, but we’ve all been there. And what sets truly remarkable marketers apart from everyone else isn’t that they don’t ever make mistakes. They do. It’s just that they learn from their failures. 

As Barack Obama put it, “You can’t let your failures define you. You have to let your failures teach you.” (Thanks, Obama. No, really. Thank you.) 

With that in mind, we asked 11 experienced marketers to share what they’ve learned from their past blunders. These pros are living proof that we can learn as much from those times things didn’t go our way as we can from our biggest wins. As you’ll see, getting it wrong helped them grow their business, develop a customer-focused philosophy, improve their abilities as a leader, and much more.

So let’s dive right in.

Jump Straight to a Lesson Learned from a Marketing Fail

Target the Right Keywords

Develop Buyer Personas to Inform Your Marketing

Put QA Checks in Place

Add Automated Checks When You QA

Validate New Ideas with Customer Research

Test One Change At a Time

Set Realistic Goals and Expectations

Create Clear Content Briefs

Promote Visibility Within Your Team

Prioritize Projects Based on Potential Impact

Don’t Sell Yourself Short

1. Target the Right Keywords

Every marketer knows the value of organic keywords. Understanding what your target audience is searching for (and how you can rank for specific keywords) can help you optimize your campaigns and develop an effective SEO strategy. 

But what if a piece of content doesn’t rank at all? What if it ends up ten pages deep in the SERPs? What if it forever sinks to the deep Mariana Trench of Google?

Take Andy Crestodina, co-founder of Orbit Media Studios. He spent over 20 hours on a 4,100+ word article (and a 12-minute video) only to have it fail as a piece of organic content. He figured he’d optimize it for a popular phrase, get it to rank, and win a steady stream of traffic. But that never happened. 

Andy owns up to why he failed:

I didn’t dig in deep enough while checking competition. As it turns out, the high ranking pages have huge numbers of inbound links. Even though the difficulty score was low, the linking root domain numbers were off the charts. But I never checked.

Andy learned a powerful lesson: your content won’t rank by magic.

You need to put hard work into targeting the right phrases that can compound traffic over time. To avoid losing your content in Google search obscurity, take the time to research the keywords you want to target first. 

Hit the sweet spot for keywords by researching phrases that have a good mix of search volume, general intent, and popularity among competitors. (Source: Orbit Media)

And don’t just look at search volume. Make sure you check out how your competitors rank to ensure you’re ready to take them on. You want to know if you’re going up against the Mohammed Ali of content before you throw your hat into the ring.

2. Develop Buyer Personas to Inform Your Marketing

Buyer personas go hand-in-hand with your marketing strategy. They’re the needle to your strategy’s thread. The arrow to your bow. The Kim to your Kanye. (You see where I’m going with this.) 

Defining the ideal customer audience you want to attract will help you market to them in the best way possible. However, to build robust, accurate buyer personas, you need one thing: data. 

Early on in his career, Brandon Gains, VP of marketing at MonetizeMore, created personas from gut-feeling alone. He didn’t validate them through qualitative research, surveys, and interviews. And without a formal process to gather internal and external data points, he failed to involve a large customer base in his company’s marketing and product direction. 

But to get internal buy-in from department heads, he needed more than his gut feeling. He needed to fix how his company crafted buyer personas:

We reignited our user research process and developed more of a scientific approach that incorporates internal and external research into concrete deliverables that I use across the company.

Like Brandon says, you need to ground your buyer personas in research and data—a.k.a. the real world (and, no, not the MTV version). Even though it’s nitty-gritty work, setting up customer interviews and internal discussions across your sales, customer success, product, and marketing teams will pay off in the long run. You’ll be able to better determine your objectives and anticipate consumer needs. 

With buyer personas, you can know how to tailor your content to segmented audiences who have different preferences, challenges, and pain points.  (Source: Unbounce)

Like any dynamic duo, buyer personas can also help you create segmented landing pages that speak to different types of visitors. You can use different templates to quickly build customized pages that’ll give them exactly what they’re looking for.

3. Put QA Checks in Place

Quality assurance is one step you should never skip, but it’s also the one you’ll be most tempted to skip. Don’t do it. Resist the urge. QA is key for ensuring a high-performing campaign.

Put yourself in your visitors’ shoes: how would you feel if you clicked on a link that went to a nonexistent page? Frustrated or annoyed? Definitely. Content with typos and broken links can create a bad first impression.

It’s what happened to Scott McLeod, chief of staff at Resident. He learned the hard way about the importance of QAing after running ads to a landing page that didn’t load. (It’s a big no-no considering you need to ensure your site loads as quickly as possible.)

His advice? Be extra mindful to check that you inspect every aspect of your campaign. Or, to put it another (bigger, bolder) way:

You need to provide a seamless user experience for your customers that will make ’em love you. Treat it like a first date: you want to please your prospects from the get-go so they’ll have more reason to want to keep dating you. (And maybe even marry you.) 

We specifically have the team follow from ad to checkout, especially for major sales or mass communications … Creating redundancy in the QA process or review process leads to less mishaps.

When you have ten other things to do, it can be tempting to call something done without going through the crucial last step of QAing it. But ensuring you take this time will save you a lot of headaches in the long run.

4. Add Automated Checks When You QA

While Scott recommends running QA checks, Derric Haynie, chief ecommerce technologist at Ecommerce Tech, takes it one step further. He suggests using automated checks to protect you from tiny errors that can cost you your ad spend. The best marketers do this to provide the best post-click experience from ad to landing page.

This realization didn’t come to Derric immediately, though. It’s something he learned after running a PPC campaign that drove to a dead 404 page. A small oversight that meant throwing $10K down the drain. (In McDonald’s terms, it’s equal to 40,000 Chicken McNuggets. A whole lotta nugs.)

Luckily, Google Ads includes final URLs to help make sure your ads are leading your prospects to the right landing page. Derric uses this field, especially for dynamic ads.

Nowadays, I’m using Google’s ‘Final URL’ column and either copy/pasting or exporting all the URLs to check the final destination works. They now have a landing page validation checker built in.

The Final URL is the address of the page in your website that people reach when they click your ad. (Source: Google)

Incorporate automated QA checks into your process wherever you can. You’ll minimize human error, and might even have some budget left over for a 10-piece McNugget. 

5. Validate New Ideas With Customer Research

These days, data needs to be the driving force behind any marketing strategy. It’s a must-have for any business’s growth and success. (If Obi-Wan Kenobi were a marketer, I’m sure he’d want you to use the data force.) 

But don’t take my word for it. Here’s Google:

Even Google reports that leading marketers believe how they apply their data is crucial to success. (Source: Think with Google)

Ask any great marketer, and they’ll tell you that they don’t make business decisions without the data to back it. It’s a best practice, but one we can easily forget.

Marc Bitanga, Founder & Managing Director at Discoverable Media, almost committed an epic fail because a key stakeholder of a media company was determined to make a drastic change to their website without the data to support it. 

The stakeholder thought the change would lead to a big win. Marc, on the other hand, felt like it wasn’t a good idea. Working with his UX team, he conducted research to confirm his hunch. He recorded real-life feedback sessions with customers to validate the stakeholder’s requirements.

Turns out Marc’s intuition was right: the proposed changes would have led to a bad experience for website visitors. If anything, Marc is a prime example of why research is the key to making informed decisions. And Marc has learned his lesson:

I avoid similar fails today by conducting as much customer research as possible to improve customer centricity.

Remember to keep your customers at the heart of every marketing idea and decision so that you can determine if an idea is viable or not. It’s frequently the difference between crash-and-burn ideas and successful ones.

6. Test One Change at a Time

Great marketing comes from testing, analyzing, and iterating based on results. (It’s an art and a science.) As marketers, we’re always busy pushing campaigns out the door, but we need to remind ourselves not to get in over our heads. When testing, that means taking a step back and making changes one at a time, versus all at once. 

For instance, Casie Gillette, senior director of digital marketing at KoMarketing, redesigned a big website for a client that involved a ton of changes at once. Everything from updating URLs, switching CMS systems, and updating content. Her mistake?

We hadn’t tested moving a site to HTTPS and changing all of the URLs and content at the same time.

The modifications led to a massive loss in qualified traffic and leads all at once, plus a host of pesky technical issues. Casie knew page content revisions and testing were both necessary to improve relevance and ranking. To increase conversions, her team tested on-page tags, created guides to compete in SERPs, and even optimized their landing pages with CTAs, banners, and forms.

It was basically an all-out blitz to find what was working and how to replicate it across the site … It really came down to consistency, testing, and replication.

There’s no magical one-size-fits-all recipe for success. But you can focus your testing efforts rather than tackling everything at once. That way, you can identify what works and what doesn’t. (It’s a testing best practice.)

Keen to grow your conversion rates? With our landing pages, you can experiment on your messaging, page design, and forms to validate ideas and score more conversions with A/B testing.

7. Set Realistic Goals and Expectations

Goals are the building blocks for any marketer. They provide clarity and guidance for when you start putting together a marketing strategy and action plan. But making sure your goals are well-defined and realistic is often easier said than done, especially if you’re ambitious.

Sphoorti Bhandare, PR and content whisperer—yep, you read that right—prepared for a big store launch one month in advance. Despite her proactive planning, though, things started to fall apart one by one a week before they were set to go live.

With little time and no contingency plan, Sphoorti postponed the launch. While not ideal, it did help her realize where she failed:

We hugely underestimated the effort required to make the launch successful and didn’t really write down a crisis communication plan for worst-case scenarios.

Many things can go wrong on a marketing campaign. When you start a new project, ask yourself: do I have the time, resources, and budget I need to accomplish everything? Then set specific, realistic marketing goals and inform everyone of them. 

The biggest lesson I took from this was to set realistic goals and expectations and consistently monitor them. Not only for the marketing team, but for every department, vendor, and executive involved.

Having a crystal clear vision of what you want to achieve can help hold you and your team accountable within a given time frame. If you aren’t able to reach your goals in the end, that’s OK. The beauty of goal-setting is taking a step back and seeing how or where you can improve next time.

(via Isaac Smith on Unsplash)

8. Create Clear Content Briefs

You’ve got your strategy. You’ve got your buyer personas. Now you’ve got to whip together some content that supports this overall strategy and speaks directly to your buyers. Before you do anything, sitting down to create a clear content brief is one of the smartest time investments you can make. 

(Believe me, you’ll thank yourself later.)

The best marketers would agree that a content brief can paint a clear picture for anyone you work with. Taru Bhargava of Foundation Marketing is one of them. 

When she first started out as a content marketer, Taru commissioned freelance writers to contribute long-form articles. To save time, she only provided them with a topic. Little did she know that this approach would backfire. 

Guess what? The lack of a detailed brief resulted in commissioned articles that suffered in quality. And, even more importantly, it turned into an enormous waste of time and effort. Realizing her blunder, Taru now follows a framework to include everything that’s required for someone to know before they create any content—the voice and tone, target audience, competitors, keywords, internal links, and more. 

Sticking to a content brief and overcommunicating the expectations is always a good strategy when working with freelancers … Providing them with as much info as possible in the first go is the best way to avoid the to & fro of edits.

Creating a content brief as your north star helps everyone understand what you want to accomplish with a piece of content. A brief can take the guesswork out of content creation, saving you time and money. 

Taru’s secret is this content writing brief template from CoSchedule. (She swears by it, so you know it’s good.)

9. Promote Visibility Within Your Team

We live in a fast-paced marketing world. Timelines fluctuate. Campaigns change. Requests from different stakeholders come at any given moment. Communicating these changes to every member of your team can be a significant challenge.

For example, Eric Siu, CEO of Single Grain, made a $500K deal to run a promotional campaign for a SaaS company. The problem? He didn’t tell his team, which left everyone scrambling at the last minute when orders started rolling in. Oops. You can imagine his colleagues weren’t too happy.

Eric admits he failed, but shares what he took away from the experience:

I learned that inter-departmental communication is important. It was a marketing fail, yes. But because so much of marketing is evangelizing your own marketing within the company, I lost respect and trust.

Making others aware of the work you’re doing—especially if that work involves them—is the key. When there’s so many tasks on the go, we need to hear something several times before we process it. Be extra clear and overcommunicate, so no one you’re working with gets caught by surprise. Then keep open lines of communication between you and any team you’re working with.

(via youxventures at Unsplash)

10. Prioritize Projects Based on Potential Impact

Managing a laundry list of priorities is probably nothing new to you. You’ve got top-level business objectives, departmental strategic initiatives, and marketing priorities to think about. But selecting the priorities that will have the greatest impact can be very tricky—especially when you have pressure from stakeholders to pursue certain projects.  

Back in 2018, the Unbounce content team wondered if Call to Action Conference might warrant a digital magazine-style recap. We wanted to write recap material to extend the lifespan of the live event. And we were inspired by Montreal’s G2 conference and the amazing, physical print book their organizers use to commemorate the experience.

Excited, the Unbounce team jumped at the chance to create a ‘zine. But, as Unbounce’s Head of Content Marketing, Jennifer Pepper, says, “there were several other content projects I should have prioritized instead. Despite eagerness and stakeholders hoping to squeeze the most reuse out of our live event, there were more pressing content priorities and I should have a) trusted my gut and b) made a more solid case for working on the projects I knew could have a greater overall payoff for the business.”

Call to Action Magazine was filled with curated insights from the 2017 Call to Action Conference.

Want to experience CTAConf this year and raise your marketing IQ? Check out the conference and workshop agenda for September 2019. Tickets are still available.

Jen now prioritizes far more ruthlessly, having learned to advocate for the right work more vocally. Her ultimate takeaway?

If you own prioritization, it’s up to you to uncover the opportunities and make sure you’re making the strongest case to stakeholders on the right stuff to create. As a content lead, it’s about how you can educate stakeholders so they understand why some things are more worthy of your team’s time than others.

11. Don’t Sell Yourself Short

Whether you’re leading a big marketing team or just part of one, it’s easy to get lost in the shuffle. Different experts have different opinions, and not everybody is right 100% of the time. How do you manage them?

Kasey Bayne, head of marketing at DataTrue, faced a difficult situation early in her career. Someone she was working with wanted to break into a new market by doing a big trade show. With no lead time or reputation in that industry (not to mention a very tight budget) Kasey had significant doubts. She voiced her concerns at first, but, against her better judgment, eventually agreed to the move. 

The trade show turned out to be a flop. Kasey learned a valuable lesson nonetheless. “When you are the expert or marketing leader in your team, it’s important to be strong about your recommendations,” she says.

Prepare your case, bring your data, and your experience to present a solid recommendation as best as you can without being so quick to give in to others.

No matter your age or years of experience in the industry, trust your knowledge as a marketer. Don’t be afraid to stand up for yourself and voice your concerns or suggestions. (As Marc Bitanga would say, it’s even better when you’re able to back up those arguments with data.) 

If at First You Fail, Try Again!

Everybody makes mistakes. Everybody has one of those days.

From these 11 examples, we can see how even experienced, expert marketers can fail. (And fail again.) But, crucially, they transform their mistakes into insights about what not to do in the future. 

So if you happen to make a mistake—and you probably will—think of it as a learning opportunity. No need to wrap yourself in a blanket of shame; own your failures and turn them into your own personal ‘aha!’ moment. 

Go on—take chances, make mistakes, and get messy.

You’ll be in great company. 

Have marketing fails you’d like to share? Leave them in the comments below, and let us know what you learned.

from Digital https://unbounce.com/campaign-strategy/marketing-fails-and-lessons-learned/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[josephkchoi]

11 Marketing Experts Share Their Marketing Fails (and Lessons Learned)

If you’ve ever failed in marketing, you’re not alone.

Nobody likes to mess up, but we’ve all been there. And what sets truly remarkable marketers apart from everyone else isn’t that they don’t ever make mistakes. They do. It’s just that they learn from their failures. 

As Barack Obama put it, “You can’t let your failures define you. You have to let your failures teach you.” (Thanks, Obama. No, really. Thank you.) 

With that in mind, we asked 11 experienced marketers to share what they’ve learned from their past blunders. These pros are living proof that we can learn as much from those times things didn’t go our way as we can from our biggest wins. As you’ll see, getting it wrong helped them grow their business, develop a customer-focused philosophy, improve their abilities as a leader, and much more.

So let’s dive right in.

Jump Straight to a Lesson Learned from a Marketing Fail

Target the Right Keywords

Develop Buyer Personas to Inform Your Marketing

Put QA Checks in Place

Add Automated Checks When You QA

Validate New Ideas with Customer Research

Test One Change At a Time

Set Realistic Goals and Expectations

Create Clear Content Briefs

Promote Visibility Within Your Team

Prioritize Projects Based on Potential Impact

Don’t Sell Yourself Short

1. Target the Right Keywords

Every marketer knows the value of organic keywords. Understanding what your target audience is searching for (and how you can rank for specific keywords) can help you optimize your campaigns and develop an effective SEO strategy. 

But what if a piece of content doesn’t rank at all? What if it ends up ten pages deep in the SERPs? What if it forever sinks to the deep Mariana Trench of Google?

Take Andy Crestodina, co-founder of Orbit Media Studios. He spent over 20 hours on a 4,100+ word article (and a 12-minute video) only to have it fail as a piece of organic content. He figured he’d optimize it for a popular phrase, get it to rank, and win a steady stream of traffic. But that never happened. 

Andy owns up to why he failed:

I didn’t dig in deep enough while checking competition. As it turns out, the high ranking pages have huge numbers of inbound links. Even though the difficulty score was low, the linking root domain numbers were off the charts. But I never checked.

Andy learned a powerful lesson: your content won’t rank by magic.

You need to put hard work into targeting the right phrases that can compound traffic over time. To avoid losing your content in Google search obscurity, take the time to research the keywords you want to target first. 

Hit the sweet spot for keywords by researching phrases that have a good mix of search volume, general intent, and popularity among competitors. (Source: Orbit Media)

And don’t just look at search volume. Make sure you check out how your competitors rank to ensure you’re ready to take them on. You want to know if you’re going up against the Mohammed Ali of content before you throw your hat into the ring.

2. Develop Buyer Personas to Inform Your Marketing

Buyer personas go hand-in-hand with your marketing strategy. They’re the needle to your strategy’s thread. The arrow to your bow. The Kim to your Kanye. (You see where I’m going with this.) 

Defining the ideal customer audience you want to attract will help you market to them in the best way possible. However, to build robust, accurate buyer personas, you need one thing: data. 

Early on in his career, Brandon Gains, VP of marketing at MonetizeMore, created personas from gut-feeling alone. He didn’t validate them through qualitative research, surveys, and interviews. And without a formal process to gather internal and external data points, he failed to involve a large customer base in his company’s marketing and product direction. 

But to get internal buy-in from department heads, he needed more than his gut feeling. He needed to fix how his company crafted buyer personas:

We reignited our user research process and developed more of a scientific approach that incorporates internal and external research into concrete deliverables that I use across the company.

Like Brandon says, you need to ground your buyer personas in research and data—a.k.a. the real world (and, no, not the MTV version). Even though it’s nitty-gritty work, setting up customer interviews and internal discussions across your sales, customer success, product, and marketing teams will pay off in the long run. You’ll be able to better determine your objectives and anticipate consumer needs. 

With buyer personas, you can know how to tailor your content to segmented audiences who have different preferences, challenges, and pain points.  (Source: Unbounce)

Like any dynamic duo, buyer personas can also help you create segmented landing pages that speak to different types of visitors. You can use different templates to quickly build customized pages that’ll give them exactly what they’re looking for.

3. Put QA Checks in Place

Quality assurance is one step you should never skip, but it’s also the one you’ll be most tempted to skip. Don’t do it. Resist the urge. QA is key for ensuring a high-performing campaign.

Put yourself in your visitors’ shoes: how would you feel if you clicked on a link that went to a nonexistent page? Frustrated or annoyed? Definitely. Content with typos and broken links can create a bad first impression.

It’s what happened to Scott McLeod, chief of staff at Resident. He learned the hard way about the importance of QAing after running ads to a landing page that didn’t load. (It’s a big no-no considering you need to ensure your site loads as quickly as possible.)

His advice? Be extra mindful to check that you inspect every aspect of your campaign. Or, to put it another (bigger, bolder) way:

You need to provide a seamless user experience for your customers that will make ’em love you. Treat it like a first date: you want to please your prospects from the get-go so they’ll have more reason to want to keep dating you. (And maybe even marry you.) 

We specifically have the team follow from ad to checkout, especially for major sales or mass communications … Creating redundancy in the QA process or review process leads to less mishaps.

When you have ten other things to do, it can be tempting to call something done without going through the crucial last step of QAing it. But ensuring you take this time will save you a lot of headaches in the long run.

4. Add Automated Checks When You QA

While Scott recommends running QA checks, Derric Haynie, chief ecommerce technologist at Ecommerce Tech, takes it one step further. He suggests using automated checks to protect you from tiny errors that can cost you your ad spend. The best marketers do this to provide the best post-click experience from ad to landing page.

This realization didn’t come to Derric immediately, though. It’s something he learned after running a PPC campaign that drove to a dead 404 page. A small oversight that meant throwing $10K down the drain. (In McDonald’s terms, it’s equal to 40,000 Chicken McNuggets. A whole lotta nugs.)

Luckily, Google Ads includes final URLs to help make sure your ads are leading your prospects to the right landing page. Derric uses this field, especially for dynamic ads.

Nowadays, I’m using Google’s ‘Final URL’ column and either copy/pasting or exporting all the URLs to check the final destination works. They now have a landing page validation checker built in.

The Final URL is the address of the page in your website that people reach when they click your ad. (Source: Google)

Incorporate automated QA checks into your process wherever you can. You’ll minimize human error, and might even have some budget left over for a 10-piece McNugget. 

5. Validate New Ideas With Customer Research

These days, data needs to be the driving force behind any marketing strategy. It’s a must-have for any business’s growth and success. (If Obi-Wan Kenobi were a marketer, I’m sure he’d want you to use the data force.) 

But don’t take my word for it. Here’s Google:

Even Google reports that leading marketers believe how they apply their data is crucial to success. (Source: Think with Google)

Ask any great marketer, and they’ll tell you that they don’t make business decisions without the data to back it. It’s a best practice, but one we can easily forget.

Marc Bitanga, Founder & Managing Director at Discoverable Media, almost committed an epic fail because a key stakeholder of a media company was determined to make a drastic change to their website without the data to support it. 

The stakeholder thought the change would lead to a big win. Marc, on the other hand, felt like it wasn’t a good idea. Working with his UX team, he conducted research to confirm his hunch. He recorded real-life feedback sessions with customers to validate the stakeholder’s requirements.

Turns out Marc’s intuition was right: the proposed changes would have led to a bad experience for website visitors. If anything, Marc is a prime example of why research is the key to making informed decisions. And Marc has learned his lesson:

I avoid similar fails today by conducting as much customer research as possible to improve customer centricity.

Remember to keep your customers at the heart of every marketing idea and decision so that you can determine if an idea is viable or not. It’s frequently the difference between crash-and-burn ideas and successful ones.

6. Test One Change at a Time

Great marketing comes from testing, analyzing, and iterating based on results. (It’s an art and a science.) As marketers, we’re always busy pushing campaigns out the door, but we need to remind ourselves not to get in over our heads. When testing, that means taking a step back and making changes one at a time, versus all at once. 

For instance, Casie Gillette, senior director of digital marketing at KoMarketing, redesigned a big website for a client that involved a ton of changes at once. Everything from updating URLs, switching CMS systems, and updating content. Her mistake?

We hadn’t tested moving a site to HTTPS and changing all of the URLs and content at the same time.

The modifications led to a massive loss in qualified traffic and leads all at once, plus a host of pesky technical issues. Casie knew page content revisions and testing were both necessary to improve relevance and ranking. To increase conversions, her team tested on-page tags, created guides to compete in SERPs, and even optimized their landing pages with CTAs, banners, and forms.

It was basically an all-out blitz to find what was working and how to replicate it across the site … It really came down to consistency, testing, and replication.

There’s no magical one-size-fits-all recipe for success. But you can focus your testing efforts rather than tackling everything at once. That way, you can identify what works and what doesn’t. (It’s a testing best practice.)

Keen to grow your conversion rates? With our landing pages, you can experiment on your messaging, page design, and forms to validate ideas and score more conversions with A/B testing.

7. Set Realistic Goals and Expectations

Goals are the building blocks for any marketer. They provide clarity and guidance for when you start putting together a marketing strategy and action plan. But making sure your goals are well-defined and realistic is often easier said than done, especially if you’re ambitious.

Sphoorti Bhandare, PR and content whisperer—yep, you read that right—prepared for a big store launch one month in advance. Despite her proactive planning, though, things started to fall apart one by one a week before they were set to go live.

With little time and no contingency plan, Sphoorti postponed the launch. While not ideal, it did help her realize where she failed:

We hugely underestimated the effort required to make the launch successful and didn’t really write down a crisis communication plan for worst-case scenarios.

Many things can go wrong on a marketing campaign. When you start a new project, ask yourself: do I have the time, resources, and budget I need to accomplish everything? Then set specific, realistic marketing goals and inform everyone of them. 

The biggest lesson I took from this was to set realistic goals and expectations and consistently monitor them. Not only for the marketing team, but for every department, vendor, and executive involved.

Having a crystal clear vision of what you want to achieve can help hold you and your team accountable within a given time frame. If you aren’t able to reach your goals in the end, that’s OK. The beauty of goal-setting is taking a step back and seeing how or where you can improve next time.

(via Isaac Smith on Unsplash)

8. Create Clear Content Briefs

You’ve got your strategy. You’ve got your buyer personas. Now you’ve got to whip together some content that supports this overall strategy and speaks directly to your buyers. Before you do anything, sitting down to create a clear content brief is one of the smartest time investments you can make. 

(Believe me, you’ll thank yourself later.)

The best marketers would agree that a content brief can paint a clear picture for anyone you work with. Taru Bhargava of Foundation Marketing is one of them. 

When she first started out as a content marketer, Taru commissioned freelance writers to contribute long-form articles. To save time, she only provided them with a topic. Little did she know that this approach would backfire. 

Guess what? The lack of a detailed brief resulted in commissioned articles that suffered in quality. And, even more importantly, it turned into an enormous waste of time and effort. Realizing her blunder, Taru now follows a framework to include everything that’s required for someone to know before they create any content—the voice and tone, target audience, competitors, keywords, internal links, and more. 

Sticking to a content brief and overcommunicating the expectations is always a good strategy when working with freelancers … Providing them with as much info as possible in the first go is the best way to avoid the to & fro of edits.

Creating a content brief as your north star helps everyone understand what you want to accomplish with a piece of content. A brief can take the guesswork out of content creation, saving you time and money. 

Taru’s secret is this content writing brief template from CoSchedule. (She swears by it, so you know it’s good.)

9. Promote Visibility Within Your Team

We live in a fast-paced marketing world. Timelines fluctuate. Campaigns change. Requests from different stakeholders come at any given moment. Communicating these changes to every member of your team can be a significant challenge.

For example, Eric Siu, CEO of Single Grain, made a $500K deal to run a promotional campaign for a SaaS company. The problem? He didn’t tell his team, which left everyone scrambling at the last minute when orders started rolling in. Oops. You can imagine his colleagues weren’t too happy.

Eric admits he failed, but shares what he took away from the experience:

I learned that inter-departmental communication is important. It was a marketing fail, yes. But because so much of marketing is evangelizing your own marketing within the company, I lost respect and trust.

Making others aware of the work you’re doing—especially if that work involves them—is the key. When there’s so many tasks on the go, we need to hear something several times before we process it. Be extra clear and overcommunicate, so no one you’re working with gets caught by surprise. Then keep open lines of communication between you and any team you’re working with.

(via youxventures at Unsplash)

10. Prioritize Projects Based on Potential Impact

Managing a laundry list of priorities is probably nothing new to you. You’ve got top-level business objectives, departmental strategic initiatives, and marketing priorities to think about. But selecting the priorities that will have the greatest impact can be very tricky—especially when you have pressure from stakeholders to pursue certain projects.  

Back in 2018, the Unbounce content team wondered if Call to Action Conference might warrant a digital magazine-style recap. We wanted to write recap material to extend the lifespan of the live event. And we were inspired by Montreal’s G2 conference and the amazing, physical print book their organizers use to commemorate the experience.

Excited, the Unbounce team jumped at the chance to create a ‘zine. But, as Unbounce’s Head of Content Marketing, Jennifer Pepper, says, “there were several other content projects I should have prioritized instead. Despite eagerness and stakeholders hoping to squeeze the most reuse out of our live event, there were more pressing content priorities and I should have a) trusted my gut and b) made a more solid case for working on the projects I knew could have a greater overall payoff for the business.”

Call to Action Magazine was filled with curated insights from the 2017 Call to Action Conference.

Want to experience CTAConf this year and raise your marketing IQ? Check out the conference and workshop agenda for September 2019. Tickets are still available.

Jen now prioritizes far more ruthlessly, having learned to advocate for the right work more vocally. Her ultimate takeaway?

If you own prioritization, it’s up to you to uncover the opportunities and make sure you’re making the strongest case to stakeholders on the right stuff to create. As a content lead, it’s about how you can educate stakeholders so they understand why some things are more worthy of your team’s time than others.

11. Don’t Sell Yourself Short

Whether you’re leading a big marketing team or just part of one, it’s easy to get lost in the shuffle. Different experts have different opinions, and not everybody is right 100% of the time. How do you manage them?

Kasey Bayne, head of marketing at DataTrue, faced a difficult situation early in her career. Someone she was working with wanted to break into a new market by doing a big trade show. With no lead time or reputation in that industry (not to mention a very tight budget) Kasey had significant doubts. She voiced her concerns at first, but, against her better judgment, eventually agreed to the move. 

The trade show turned out to be a flop. Kasey learned a valuable lesson nonetheless. “When you are the expert or marketing leader in your team, it’s important to be strong about your recommendations,” she says.

Prepare your case, bring your data, and your experience to present a solid recommendation as best as you can without being so quick to give in to others.

No matter your age or years of experience in the industry, trust your knowledge as a marketer. Don’t be afraid to stand up for yourself and voice your concerns or suggestions. (As Marc Bitanga would say, it’s even better when you’re able to back up those arguments with data.) 

If at First You Fail, Try Again!

Everybody makes mistakes. Everybody has one of those days.

From these 11 examples, we can see how even experienced, expert marketers can fail. (And fail again.) But, crucially, they transform their mistakes into insights about what not to do in the future. 

So if you happen to make a mistake—and you probably will—think of it as a learning opportunity. No need to wrap yourself in a blanket of shame; own your failures and turn them into your own personal ‘aha!’ moment. 

Go on—take chances, make mistakes, and get messy.

You’ll be in great company. 

Have marketing fails you’d like to share? Leave them in the comments below, and let us know what you learned.

11 Marketing Experts Share Their Marketing Fails (and Lessons Learned) published first on https://nickpontemrktg.wordpress.com/

[jjonassevilla]

11 Marketing Experts Share Their Marketing Fails (and Lessons Learned)

If you’ve ever failed in marketing, you’re not alone.

Nobody likes to mess up, but we’ve all been there. And what sets truly remarkable marketers apart from everyone else isn’t that they don’t ever make mistakes. They do. It’s just that they learn from their failures. 

As Barack Obama put it, “You can’t let your failures define you. You have to let your failures teach you.” (Thanks, Obama. No, really. Thank you.) 

With that in mind, we asked 11 experienced marketers to share what they’ve learned from their past blunders. These pros are living proof that we can learn as much from those times things didn’t go our way as we can from our biggest wins. As you’ll see, getting it wrong helped them grow their business, develop a customer-focused philosophy, improve their abilities as a leader, and much more.

So let’s dive right in.

Jump Straight to a Lesson Learned from a Marketing Fail

Target the Right Keywords

Develop Buyer Personas to Inform Your Marketing

Put QA Checks in Place

Add Automated Checks When You QA

Validate New Ideas with Customer Research

Test One Change At a Time

Set Realistic Goals and Expectations

Create Clear Content Briefs

Promote Visibility Within Your Team

Prioritize Projects Based on Potential Impact

Don’t Sell Yourself Short

1. Target the Right Keywords

Every marketer knows the value of organic keywords. Understanding what your target audience is searching for (and how you can rank for specific keywords) can help you optimize your campaigns and develop an effective SEO strategy. 

But what if a piece of content doesn’t rank at all? What if it ends up ten pages deep in the SERPs? What if it forever sinks to the deep Mariana Trench of Google?

Take Andy Crestodina, co-founder of Orbit Media Studios. He spent over 20 hours on a 4,100+ word article (and a 12-minute video) only to have it fail as a piece of organic content. He figured he’d optimize it for a popular phrase, get it to rank, and win a steady stream of traffic. But that never happened. 

Andy owns up to why he failed:

I didn’t dig in deep enough while checking competition. As it turns out, the high ranking pages have huge numbers of inbound links. Even though the difficulty score was low, the linking root domain numbers were off the charts. But I never checked.

Andy learned a powerful lesson: your content won’t rank by magic.

You need to put hard work into targeting the right phrases that can compound traffic over time. To avoid losing your content in Google search obscurity, take the time to research the keywords you want to target first. 

Hit the sweet spot for keywords by researching phrases that have a good mix of search volume, general intent, and popularity among competitors. (Source: Orbit Media)

And don’t just look at search volume. Make sure you check out how your competitors rank to ensure you’re ready to take them on. You want to know if you’re going up against the Mohammed Ali of content before you throw your hat into the ring.

2. Develop Buyer Personas to Inform Your Marketing

Buyer personas go hand-in-hand with your marketing strategy. They’re the needle to your strategy’s thread. The arrow to your bow. The Kim to your Kanye. (You see where I’m going with this.) 

Defining the ideal customer audience you want to attract will help you market to them in the best way possible. However, to build robust, accurate buyer personas, you need one thing: data. 

Early on in his career, Brandon Gains, VP of marketing at MonetizeMore, created personas from gut-feeling alone. He didn’t validate them through qualitative research, surveys, and interviews. And without a formal process to gather internal and external data points, he failed to involve a large customer base in his company’s marketing and product direction. 

But to get internal buy-in from department heads, he needed more than his gut feeling. He needed to fix how his company crafted buyer personas:

We reignited our user research process and developed more of a scientific approach that incorporates internal and external research into concrete deliverables that I use across the company.

Like Brandon says, you need to ground your buyer personas in research and data—a.k.a. the real world (and, no, not the MTV version). Even though it’s nitty-gritty work, setting up customer interviews and internal discussions across your sales, customer success, product, and marketing teams will pay off in the long run. You’ll be able to better determine your objectives and anticipate consumer needs. 

With buyer personas, you can know how to tailor your content to segmented audiences who have different preferences, challenges, and pain points.  (Source: Unbounce)

Like any dynamic duo, buyer personas can also help you create segmented landing pages that speak to different types of visitors. You can use different templates to quickly build customized pages that’ll give them exactly what they’re looking for.

3. Put QA Checks in Place

Quality assurance is one step you should never skip, but it’s also the one you’ll be most tempted to skip. Don’t do it. Resist the urge. QA is key for ensuring a high-performing campaign.

Put yourself in your visitors’ shoes: how would you feel if you clicked on a link that went to a nonexistent page? Frustrated or annoyed? Definitely. Content with typos and broken links can create a bad first impression.

It’s what happened to Scott McLeod, chief of staff at Resident. He learned the hard way about the importance of QAing after running ads to a landing page that didn’t load. (It’s a big no-no considering you need to ensure your site loads as quickly as possible.)

His advice? Be extra mindful to check that you inspect every aspect of your campaign. Or, to put it another (bigger, bolder) way:

You need to provide a seamless user experience for your customers that will make ’em love you. Treat it like a first date: you want to please your prospects from the get-go so they’ll have more reason to want to keep dating you. (And maybe even marry you.) 

We specifically have the team follow from ad to checkout, especially for major sales or mass communications … Creating redundancy in the QA process or review process leads to less mishaps.

When you have ten other things to do, it can be tempting to call something done without going through the crucial last step of QAing it. But ensuring you take this time will save you a lot of headaches in the long run.

4. Add Automated Checks When You QA

While Scott recommends running QA checks, Derric Haynie, chief ecommerce technologist at Ecommerce Tech, takes it one step further. He suggests using automated checks to protect you from tiny errors that can cost you your ad spend. The best marketers do this to provide the best post-click experience from ad to landing page.

This realization didn’t come to Derric immediately, though. It’s something he learned after running a PPC campaign that drove to a dead 404 page. A small oversight that meant throwing $10K down the drain. (In McDonald’s terms, it’s equal to 40,000 Chicken McNuggets. A whole lotta nugs.)

Luckily, Google Ads includes final URLs to help make sure your ads are leading your prospects to the right landing page. Derric uses this field, especially for dynamic ads.

Nowadays, I’m using Google’s ‘Final URL’ column and either copy/pasting or exporting all the URLs to check the final destination works. They now have a landing page validation checker built in.

The Final URL is the address of the page in your website that people reach when they click your ad. (Source: Google)

Incorporate automated QA checks into your process wherever you can. You’ll minimize human error, and might even have some budget left over for a 10-piece McNugget. 

5. Validate New Ideas With Customer Research

These days, data needs to be the driving force behind any marketing strategy. It’s a must-have for any business’s growth and success. (If Obi-Wan Kenobi were a marketer, I’m sure he’d want you to use the data force.) 

But don’t take my word for it. Here’s Google:

Even Google reports that leading marketers believe how they apply their data is crucial to success. (Source: Think with Google)

Ask any great marketer, and they’ll tell you that they don’t make business decisions without the data to back it. It’s a best practice, but one we can easily forget.

Marc Bitanga, CEO at Agencio, almost committed an epic fail because a key stakeholder of a media company was determined to make a drastic change to their website without the data to support it. 

The stakeholder thought the change would lead to a big win. Marc, on the other hand, felt like it wasn’t a good idea. Working with his UX team, he conducted research to confirm his hunch. He recorded real-life feedback sessions with customers to validate the stakeholder’s requirements.

Turns out Marc’s intuition was right: the proposed changes would have led to a bad experience for website visitors. If anything, Marc is a prime example of why research is the key to making informed decisions. And Marc has learned his lesson:

I avoid similar fails today by conducting as much customer research as possible to improve customer centricity.

Remember to keep your customers at the heart of every marketing idea and decision so that you can determine if an idea is viable or not. It’s frequently the difference between crash-and-burn ideas and successful ones.

6. Test One Change at a Time

Great marketing comes from testing, analyzing, and iterating based on results. (It’s an art and a science.) As marketers, we’re always busy pushing campaigns out the door, but we need to remind ourselves not to get in over our heads. When testing, that means taking a step back and making changes one at a time, versus all at once. 

For instance, Casie Gillette, senior director of digital marketing at KoMarketing, redesigned a big website for a client that involved a ton of changes at once. Everything from updating URLs, switching CMS systems, and updating content. Her mistake?

We hadn’t tested moving a site to HTTPS and changing all of the URLs and content at the same time.

The modifications led to a massive loss in qualified traffic and leads all at once, plus a host of pesky technical issues. Casie knew page content revisions and testing were both necessary to improve relevance and ranking. To increase conversions, her team tested on-page tags, created guides to compete in SERPs, and even optimized their landing pages with CTAs, banners, and forms.

It was basically an all-out blitz to find what was working and how to replicate it across the site … It really came down to consistency, testing, and replication.

There’s no magical one-size-fits-all recipe for success. But you can focus your testing efforts rather than tackling everything at once. That way, you can identify what works and what doesn’t. (It’s a testing best practice.)

Keen to grow your conversion rates? With our landing pages, you can experiment on your messaging, page design, and forms to validate ideas and score more conversions with A/B testing.

7. Set Realistic Goals and Expectations

Goals are the building blocks for any marketer. They provide clarity and guidance for when you start putting together a marketing strategy and action plan. But making sure your goals are well-defined and realistic is often easier said than done, especially if you’re ambitious.

Sphoorti Bhandare, PR and content whisperer—yep, you read that right—prepared for a big store launch one month in advance. Despite her proactive planning, though, things started to fall apart one by one a week before they were set to go live.

With little time and no contingency plan, Sphoorti postponed the launch. While not ideal, it did help her realize where she failed:

We hugely underestimated the effort required to make the launch successful and didn’t really write down a crisis communication plan for worst-case scenarios.

Many things can go wrong on a marketing campaign. When you start a new project, ask yourself: do I have the time, resources, and budget I need to accomplish everything? Then set specific, realistic marketing goals and inform everyone of them. 

The biggest lesson I took from this was to set realistic goals and expectations and consistently monitor them. Not only for the marketing team, but for every department, vendor, and executive involved.

Having a crystal clear vision of what you want to achieve can help hold you and your team accountable within a given time frame. If you aren’t able to reach your goals in the end, that’s OK. The beauty of goal-setting is taking a step back and seeing how or where you can improve next time.

(via Isaac Smith on Unsplash)

8. Create Clear Content Briefs

You’ve got your strategy. You’ve got your buyer personas. Now you’ve got to whip together some content that supports this overall strategy and speaks directly to your buyers. Before you do anything, sitting down to create a clear content brief is one of the smartest time investments you can make. 

(Believe me, you’ll thank yourself later.)

The best marketers would agree that a content brief can paint a clear picture for anyone you work with. Taru Bhargava of Foundation Marketing is one of them. 

When she first started out as a content marketer, Taru commissioned freelance writers to contribute long-form articles. To save time, she only provided them with a topic. Little did she know that this approach would backfire. 

Guess what? The lack of a detailed brief resulted in commissioned articles that suffered in quality. And, even more importantly, it turned into an enormous waste of time and effort. Realizing her blunder, Taru now follows a framework to include everything that’s required for someone to know before they create any content—the voice and tone, target audience, competitors, keywords, internal links, and more. 

Sticking to a content brief and overcommunicating the expectations is always a good strategy when working with freelancers … Providing them with as much info as possible in the first go is the best way to avoid the to & fro of edits.

Creating a content brief as your north star helps everyone understand what you want to accomplish with a piece of content. A brief can take the guesswork out of content creation, saving you time and money. 

Taru’s secret is this content writing brief template from CoSchedule. (She swears by it, so you know it’s good.)

9. Promote Visibility Within Your Team

We live in a fast-paced marketing world. Timelines fluctuate. Campaigns change. Requests from different stakeholders come at any given moment. Communicating these changes to every member of your team can be a significant challenge.

For example, Eric Siu, CEO of Single Grain, made a $500K deal to run a promotional campaign for a SaaS company. The problem? He didn’t tell his team, which left everyone scrambling at the last minute when orders started rolling in. Oops. You can imagine his colleagues weren’t too happy.

Eric admits he failed, but shares what he took away from the experience:

I learned that inter-departmental communication is important. It was a marketing fail, yes. But because so much of marketing is evangelizing your own marketing within the company, I lost respect and trust.

Making others aware of the work you’re doing—especially if that work involves them—is the key. When there’s so many tasks on the go, we need to hear something several times before we process it. Be extra clear and overcommunicate, so no one you’re working with gets caught by surprise. Then keep open lines of communication between you and any team you’re working with.

(via youxventures at Unsplash)

10. Prioritize Projects Based on Potential Impact

Managing a laundry list of priorities is probably nothing new to you. You’ve got top-level business objectives, departmental strategic initiatives, and marketing priorities to think about. But selecting the priorities that will have the greatest impact can be very tricky—especially when you have pressure from stakeholders to pursue certain projects.  

Back in 2018, the Unbounce content team wondered if Call to Action Conference might warrant a digital magazine-style recap. We wanted to write recap material to extend the lifespan of the live event. And we were inspired by Montreal’s G2 conference and the amazing, physical print book their organizers use to commemorate the experience.

Excited, the Unbounce team jumped at the chance to create a ‘zine. But, as Unbounce’s Head of Content Marketing, Jennifer Pepper, says, “there were several other content projects I should have prioritized instead. Despite eagerness and stakeholders hoping to squeeze the most reuse out of our live event, there were more pressing content priorities and I should have a) trusted my gut and b) made a more solid case for working on the projects I knew could have a greater overall payoff for the business.”

Call to Action Magazine was filled with curated insights from the 2017 Call to Action Conference.

Want to experience CTAConf this year and raise your marketing IQ? Check out the conference and workshop agenda for September 2019. Tickets are still available.

Jen now prioritizes far more ruthlessly, having learned to advocate for the right work more vocally. Her ultimate takeaway?

If you own prioritization, it’s up to you to uncover the opportunities and make sure you’re making the strongest case to stakeholders on the right stuff to create. As a content lead, it’s about how you can educate stakeholders so they understand why some things are more worthy of your team’s time than others.

11. Don’t Sell Yourself Short

Whether you’re leading a big marketing team or just part of one, it’s easy to get lost in the shuffle. Different experts have different opinions, and not everybody is right 100% of the time. How do you manage them?

Kasey Bayne, head of marketing at DataTrue, faced a difficult situation early in her career. Someone she was working with wanted to break into a new market by doing a big trade show. With no lead time or reputation in that industry (not to mention a very tight budget) Kasey had significant doubts. She voiced her concerns at first, but, against her better judgment, eventually agreed to the move. 

The trade show turned out to be a flop. Kasey learned a valuable lesson nonetheless. “When you are the expert or marketing leader in your team, it’s important to be strong about your recommendations,” she says.

Prepare your case, bring your data, and your experience to present a solid recommendation as best as you can without being so quick to give in to others.

No matter your age or years of experience in the industry, trust your knowledge as a marketer. Don’t be afraid to stand up for yourself and voice your concerns or suggestions. (As Marc Bitanga would say, it’s even better when you’re able to back up those arguments with data.) 

If at First You Fail, Try Again!

Everybody makes mistakes. Everybody has one of those days.

From these 11 examples, we can see how even experienced, expert marketers can fail. (And fail again.) But, crucially, they transform their mistakes into insights about what not to do in the future. 

So if you happen to make a mistake—and you probably will—think of it as a learning opportunity. No need to wrap yourself in a blanket of shame; own your failures and turn them into your own personal ‘aha!’ moment. 

Go on—take chances, make mistakes, and get messy.

You’ll be in great company. 

Have marketing fails you’d like to share? Leave them in the comments below, and let us know what you learned.

from Marketing https://unbounce.com/campaign-strategy/marketing-fails-and-lessons-learned/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[itsjessicaisreal]

11 Marketing Experts Share Their Marketing Fails (and Lessons Learned)

If you’ve ever failed in marketing, you’re not alone.

Nobody likes to mess up, but we’ve all been there. And what sets truly remarkable marketers apart from everyone else isn’t that they don’t ever make mistakes. They do. It’s just that they learn from their failures. 

As Barack Obama put it, “You can’t let your failures define you. You have to let your failures teach you.” (Thanks, Obama. No, really. Thank you.) 

With that in mind, we asked 11 experienced marketers to share what they’ve learned from their past blunders. These pros are living proof that we can learn as much from those times things didn’t go our way as we can from our biggest wins. As you’ll see, getting it wrong helped them grow their business, develop a customer-focused philosophy, improve their abilities as a leader, and much more.

So let’s dive right in.

Jump Straight to a Lesson Learned from a Marketing Fail

Target the Right Keywords

Develop Buyer Personas to Inform Your Marketing

Put QA Checks in Place

Add Automated Checks When You QA

Validate New Ideas with Customer Research

Test One Change At a Time

Set Realistic Goals and Expectations

Create Clear Content Briefs

Promote Visibility Within Your Team

Prioritize Projects Based on Potential Impact

Don’t Sell Yourself Short

1. Target the Right Keywords

Every marketer knows the value of organic keywords. Understanding what your target audience is searching for (and how you can rank for specific keywords) can help you optimize your campaigns and develop an effective SEO strategy. 

But what if a piece of content doesn’t rank at all? What if it ends up ten pages deep in the SERPs? What if it forever sinks to the deep Mariana Trench of Google?

Take Andy Crestodina, co-founder of Orbit Media Studios. He spent over 20 hours on a 4,100+ word article (and a 12-minute video) only to have it fail as a piece of organic content. He figured he’d optimize it for a popular phrase, get it to rank, and win a steady stream of traffic. But that never happened. 

Andy owns up to why he failed:

I didn’t dig in deep enough while checking competition. As it turns out, the high ranking pages have huge numbers of inbound links. Even though the difficulty score was low, the linking root domain numbers were off the charts. But I never checked.

Andy learned a powerful lesson: your content won’t rank by magic.

You need to put hard work into targeting the right phrases that can compound traffic over time. To avoid losing your content in Google search obscurity, take the time to research the keywords you want to target first. 

Hit the sweet spot for keywords by researching phrases that have a good mix of search volume, general intent, and popularity among competitors. (Source: Orbit Media)

And don’t just look at search volume. Make sure you check out how your competitors rank to ensure you’re ready to take them on. You want to know if you’re going up against the Mohammed Ali of content before you throw your hat into the ring.

2. Develop Buyer Personas to Inform Your Marketing

Buyer personas go hand-in-hand with your marketing strategy. They’re the needle to your strategy’s thread. The arrow to your bow. The Kim to your Kanye. (You see where I’m going with this.) 

Defining the ideal customer audience you want to attract will help you market to them in the best way possible. However, to build robust, accurate buyer personas, you need one thing: data. 

Early on in his career, Brandon Gains, VP of marketing at MonetizeMore, created personas from gut-feeling alone. He didn’t validate them through qualitative research, surveys, and interviews. And without a formal process to gather internal and external data points, he failed to involve a large customer base in his company’s marketing and product direction. 

But to get internal buy-in from department heads, he needed more than his gut feeling. He needed to fix how his company crafted buyer personas:

We reignited our user research process and developed more of a scientific approach that incorporates internal and external research into concrete deliverables that I use across the company.

Like Brandon says, you need to ground your buyer personas in research and data—a.k.a. the real world (and, no, not the MTV version). Even though it’s nitty-gritty work, setting up customer interviews and internal discussions across your sales, customer success, product, and marketing teams will pay off in the long run. You’ll be able to better determine your objectives and anticipate consumer needs. 

With buyer personas, you can know how to tailor your content to segmented audiences who have different preferences, challenges, and pain points.  (Source: Unbounce)

Like any dynamic duo, buyer personas can also help you create segmented landing pages that speak to different types of visitors. You can use different templates to quickly build customized pages that’ll give them exactly what they’re looking for.

3. Put QA Checks in Place

Quality assurance is one step you should never skip, but it’s also the one you’ll be most tempted to skip. Don’t do it. Resist the urge. QA is key for ensuring a high-performing campaign.

Put yourself in your visitors’ shoes: how would you feel if you clicked on a link that went to a nonexistent page? Frustrated or annoyed? Definitely. Content with typos and broken links can create a bad first impression.

It’s what happened to Scott McLeod, chief of staff at Resident. He learned the hard way about the importance of QAing after running ads to a landing page that didn’t load. (It’s a big no-no considering you need to ensure your site loads as quickly as possible.)

His advice? Be extra mindful to check that you inspect every aspect of your campaign. Or, to put it another (bigger, bolder) way:

You need to provide a seamless user experience for your customers that will make ’em love you. Treat it like a first date: you want to please your prospects from the get-go so they’ll have more reason to want to keep dating you. (And maybe even marry you.) 

We specifically have the team follow from ad to checkout, especially for major sales or mass communications … Creating redundancy in the QA process or review process leads to less mishaps.

When you have ten other things to do, it can be tempting to call something done without going through the crucial last step of QAing it. But ensuring you take this time will save you a lot of headaches in the long run.

4. Add Automated Checks When You QA

While Scott recommends running QA checks, Derric Haynie, chief ecommerce technologist at Ecommerce Tech, takes it one step further. He suggests using automated checks to protect you from tiny errors that can cost you your ad spend. The best marketers do this to provide the best post-click experience from ad to landing page.

This realization didn’t come to Derric immediately, though. It’s something he learned after running a PPC campaign that drove to a dead 404 page. A small oversight that meant throwing $10K down the drain. (In McDonald’s terms, it’s equal to 40,000 Chicken McNuggets. A whole lotta nugs.)

Luckily, Google Ads includes final URLs to help make sure your ads are leading your prospects to the right landing page. Derric uses this field, especially for dynamic ads.

Nowadays, I’m using Google’s ‘Final URL’ column and either copy/pasting or exporting all the URLs to check the final destination works. They now have a landing page validation checker built in.

The Final URL is the address of the page in your website that people reach when they click your ad. (Source: Google)

Incorporate automated QA checks into your process wherever you can. You’ll minimize human error, and might even have some budget left over for a 10-piece McNugget. 

5. Validate New Ideas With Customer Research

These days, data needs to be the driving force behind any marketing strategy. It’s a must-have for any business’s growth and success. (If Obi-Wan Kenobi were a marketer, I’m sure he’d want you to use the data force.) 

But don’t take my word for it. Here’s Google:

Even Google reports that leading marketers believe how they apply their data is crucial to success. (Source: Think with Google)

Ask any great marketer, and they’ll tell you that they don’t make business decisions without the data to back it. It’s a best practice, but one we can easily forget.

Marc Bitanga, CEO at Agencio, almost committed an epic fail because a key stakeholder of a media company was determined to make a drastic change to their website without the data to support it. 

The stakeholder thought the change would lead to a big win. Marc, on the other hand, felt like it wasn’t a good idea. Working with his UX team, he conducted research to confirm his hunch. He recorded real-life feedback sessions with customers to validate the stakeholder’s requirements.

Turns out Marc’s intuition was right: the proposed changes would have led to a bad experience for website visitors. If anything, Marc is a prime example of why research is the key to making informed decisions. And Marc has learned his lesson:

I avoid similar fails today by conducting as much customer research as possible to improve customer centricity.

Remember to keep your customers at the heart of every marketing idea and decision so that you can determine if an idea is viable or not. It’s frequently the difference between crash-and-burn ideas and successful ones.

6. Test One Change at a Time

Great marketing comes from testing, analyzing, and iterating based on results. (It’s an art and a science.) As marketers, we’re always busy pushing campaigns out the door, but we need to remind ourselves not to get in over our heads. When testing, that means taking a step back and making changes one at a time, versus all at once. 

For instance, Casie Gillette, senior director of digital marketing at KoMarketing, redesigned a big website for a client that involved a ton of changes at once. Everything from updating URLs, switching CMS systems, and updating content. Her mistake?

We hadn’t tested moving a site to HTTPS and changing all of the URLs and content at the same time.

The modifications led to a massive loss in qualified traffic and leads all at once, plus a host of pesky technical issues. Casie knew page content revisions and testing were both necessary to improve relevance and ranking. To increase conversions, her team tested on-page tags, created guides to compete in SERPs, and even optimized their landing pages with CTAs, banners, and forms.

It was basically an all-out blitz to find what was working and how to replicate it across the site … It really came down to consistency, testing, and replication.

There’s no magical one-size-fits-all recipe for success. But you can focus your testing efforts rather than tackling everything at once. That way, you can identify what works and what doesn’t. (It’s a testing best practice.)

Keen to grow your conversion rates? With our landing pages, you can experiment on your messaging, page design, and forms to validate ideas and score more conversions with A/B testing.

7. Set Realistic Goals and Expectations

Goals are the building blocks for any marketer. They provide clarity and guidance for when you start putting together a marketing strategy and action plan. But making sure your goals are well-defined and realistic is often easier said than done, especially if you’re ambitious.

Sphoorti Bhandare, PR and content whisperer—yep, you read that right—prepared for a big store launch one month in advance. Despite her proactive planning, though, things started to fall apart one by one a week before they were set to go live.

With little time and no contingency plan, Sphoorti postponed the launch. While not ideal, it did help her realize where she failed:

We hugely underestimated the effort required to make the launch successful and didn’t really write down a crisis communication plan for worst-case scenarios.

Many things can go wrong on a marketing campaign. When you start a new project, ask yourself: do I have the time, resources, and budget I need to accomplish everything? Then set specific, realistic marketing goals and inform everyone of them. 

The biggest lesson I took from this was to set realistic goals and expectations and consistently monitor them. Not only for the marketing team, but for every department, vendor, and executive involved.

Having a crystal clear vision of what you want to achieve can help hold you and your team accountable within a given time frame. If you aren’t able to reach your goals in the end, that’s OK. The beauty of goal-setting is taking a step back and seeing how or where you can improve next time.

(via Isaac Smith on Unsplash)

8. Create Clear Content Briefs

You’ve got your strategy. You’ve got your buyer personas. Now you’ve got to whip together some content that supports this overall strategy and speaks directly to your buyers. Before you do anything, sitting down to create a clear content brief is one of the smartest time investments you can make. 

(Believe me, you’ll thank yourself later.)

The best marketers would agree that a content brief can paint a clear picture for anyone you work with. Taru Bhargava of Foundation Marketing is one of them. 

When she first started out as a content marketer, Taru commissioned freelance writers to contribute long-form articles. To save time, she only provided them with a topic. Little did she know that this approach would backfire. 

Guess what? The lack of a detailed brief resulted in commissioned articles that suffered in quality. And, even more importantly, it turned into an enormous waste of time and effort. Realizing her blunder, Taru now follows a framework to include everything that’s required for someone to know before they create any content—the voice and tone, target audience, competitors, keywords, internal links, and more. 

Sticking to a content brief and overcommunicating the expectations is always a good strategy when working with freelancers … Providing them with as much info as possible in the first go is the best way to avoid the to & fro of edits.

Creating a content brief as your north star helps everyone understand what you want to accomplish with a piece of content. A brief can take the guesswork out of content creation, saving you time and money. 

Taru’s secret is this content writing brief template from CoSchedule. (She swears by it, so you know it’s good.)

9. Promote Visibility Within Your Team

We live in a fast-paced marketing world. Timelines fluctuate. Campaigns change. Requests from different stakeholders come at any given moment. Communicating these changes to every member of your team can be a significant challenge.

For example, Eric Siu, CEO of Single Grain, made a $500K deal to run a promotional campaign for a SaaS company. The problem? He didn’t tell his team, which left everyone scrambling at the last minute when orders started rolling in. Oops. You can imagine his colleagues weren’t too happy.

Eric admits he failed, but shares what he took away from the experience:

I learned that inter-departmental communication is important. It was a marketing fail, yes. But because so much of marketing is evangelizing your own marketing within the company, I lost respect and trust.

Making others aware of the work you’re doing—especially if that work involves them—is the key. When there’s so many tasks on the go, we need to hear something several times before we process it. Be extra clear and overcommunicate, so no one you’re working with gets caught by surprise. Then keep open lines of communication between you and any team you’re working with.

(via youxventures at Unsplash)

10. Prioritize Projects Based on Potential Impact

Managing a laundry list of priorities is probably nothing new to you. You’ve got top-level business objectives, departmental strategic initiatives, and marketing priorities to think about. But selecting the priorities that will have the greatest impact can be very tricky—especially when you have pressure from stakeholders to pursue certain projects.  

Back in 2018, the Unbounce content team wondered if Call to Action Conference might warrant a digital magazine-style recap. We wanted to write recap material to extend the lifespan of the live event. And we were inspired by Montreal’s G2 conference and the amazing, physical print book their organizers use to commemorate the experience.

Excited, the Unbounce team jumped at the chance to create a ‘zine. But, as Unbounce’s Head of Content Marketing, Jennifer Pepper, says, “there were several other content projects I should have prioritized instead. Despite eagerness and stakeholders hoping to squeeze the most reuse out of our live event, there were more pressing content priorities and I should have a) trusted my gut and b) made a more solid case for working on the projects I knew could have a greater overall payoff for the business.”

Call to Action Magazine was filled with curated insights from the 2017 Call to Action Conference.

Want to experience CTAConf this year and raise your marketing IQ? Check out the conference and workshop agenda for September 2019. Tickets are still available.

Jen now prioritizes far more ruthlessly, having learned to advocate for the right work more vocally. Her ultimate takeaway?

If you own prioritization, it’s up to you to uncover the opportunities and make sure you’re making the strongest case to stakeholders on the right stuff to create. As a content lead, it’s about how you can educate stakeholders so they understand why some things are more worthy of your team’s time than others.

11. Don’t Sell Yourself Short

Whether you’re leading a big marketing team or just part of one, it’s easy to get lost in the shuffle. Different experts have different opinions, and not everybody is right 100% of the time. How do you manage them?

Kasey Bayne, head of marketing at DataTrue, faced a difficult situation early in her career. Someone she was working with wanted to break into a new market by doing a big trade show. With no lead time or reputation in that industry (not to mention a very tight budget) Kasey had significant doubts. She voiced her concerns at first, but, against her better judgment, eventually agreed to the move. 

The trade show turned out to be a flop. Kasey learned a valuable lesson nonetheless. “When you are the expert or marketing leader in your team, it’s important to be strong about your recommendations,” she says.

Prepare your case, bring your data, and your experience to present a solid recommendation as best as you can without being so quick to give in to others.

No matter your age or years of experience in the industry, trust your knowledge as a marketer. Don’t be afraid to stand up for yourself and voice your concerns or suggestions. (As Marc Bitanga would say, it’s even better when you’re able to back up those arguments with data.) 

If at First You Fail, Try Again!

Everybody makes mistakes. Everybody has one of those days.

From these 11 examples, we can see how even experienced, expert marketers can fail. (And fail again.) But, crucially, they transform their mistakes into insights about what not to do in the future. 

So if you happen to make a mistake—and you probably will—think of it as a learning opportunity. No need to wrap yourself in a blanket of shame; own your failures and turn them into your own personal ‘aha!’ moment. 

Go on—take chances, make mistakes, and get messy.

You’ll be in great company. 

Have marketing fails you’d like to share? Leave them in the comments below, and let us know what you learned.

from Marketing https://unbounce.com/campaign-strategy/marketing-fails-and-lessons-learned/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[samanthasmeyers]

11 Marketing Experts Share Their Marketing Fails (and Lessons Learned)

If you’ve ever failed in marketing, you’re not alone.

Nobody likes to mess up, but we’ve all been there. And what sets truly remarkable marketers apart from everyone else isn’t that they don’t ever make mistakes. They do. It’s just that they learn from their failures. 

As Barack Obama put it, “You can’t let your failures define you. You have to let your failures teach you.” (Thanks, Obama. No, really. Thank you.) 

With that in mind, we asked 11 experienced marketers to share what they’ve learned from their past blunders. These pros are living proof that we can learn as much from those times things didn’t go our way as we can from our biggest wins. As you’ll see, getting it wrong helped them grow their business, develop a customer-focused philosophy, improve their abilities as a leader, and much more.

So let’s dive right in.

Jump Straight to a Lesson Learned from a Marketing Fail

Target the Right Keywords

Develop Buyer Personas to Inform Your Marketing

Put QA Checks in Place

Add Automated Checks When You QA

Validate New Ideas with Customer Research

Test One Change At a Time

Set Realistic Goals and Expectations

Create Clear Content Briefs

Promote Visibility Within Your Team

Prioritize Projects Based on Potential Impact

Don’t Sell Yourself Short

1. Target the Right Keywords

Every marketer knows the value of organic keywords. Understanding what your target audience is searching for (and how you can rank for specific keywords) can help you optimize your campaigns and develop an effective SEO strategy. 

But what if a piece of content doesn’t rank at all? What if it ends up ten pages deep in the SERPs? What if it forever sinks to the deep Mariana Trench of Google?

Take Andy Crestodina, co-founder of Orbit Media Studios. He spent over 20 hours on a 4,100+ word article (and a 12-minute video) only to have it fail as a piece of organic content. He figured he’d optimize it for a popular phrase, get it to rank, and win a steady stream of traffic. But that never happened. 

Andy owns up to why he failed:

I didn’t dig in deep enough while checking competition. As it turns out, the high ranking pages have huge numbers of inbound links. Even though the difficulty score was low, the linking root domain numbers were off the charts. But I never checked.

Andy learned a powerful lesson: your content won’t rank by magic.

You need to put hard work into targeting the right phrases that can compound traffic over time. To avoid losing your content in Google search obscurity, take the time to research the keywords you want to target first. 

Hit the sweet spot for keywords by researching phrases that have a good mix of search volume, general intent, and popularity among competitors. (Source: Orbit Media)

And don’t just look at search volume. Make sure you check out how your competitors rank to ensure you’re ready to take them on. You want to know if you’re going up against the Mohammed Ali of content before you throw your hat into the ring.

2. Develop Buyer Personas to Inform Your Marketing

Buyer personas go hand-in-hand with your marketing strategy. They’re the needle to your strategy’s thread. The arrow to your bow. The Kim to your Kanye. (You see where I’m going with this.) 

Defining the ideal customer audience you want to attract will help you market to them in the best way possible. However, to build robust, accurate buyer personas, you need one thing: data. 

Early on in his career, Brandon Gains, VP of marketing at MonetizeMore, created personas from gut-feeling alone. He didn’t validate them through qualitative research, surveys, and interviews. And without a formal process to gather internal and external data points, he failed to involve a large customer base in his company’s marketing and product direction. 

But to get internal buy-in from department heads, he needed more than his gut feeling. He needed to fix how his company crafted buyer personas:

We reignited our user research process and developed more of a scientific approach that incorporates internal and external research into concrete deliverables that I use across the company.

Like Brandon says, you need to ground your buyer personas in research and data—a.k.a. the real world (and, no, not the MTV version). Even though it’s nitty-gritty work, setting up customer interviews and internal discussions across your sales, customer success, product, and marketing teams will pay off in the long run. You’ll be able to better determine your objectives and anticipate consumer needs. 

With buyer personas, you can know how to tailor your content to segmented audiences who have different preferences, challenges, and pain points.  (Source: Unbounce)

Like any dynamic duo, buyer personas can also help you create segmented landing pages that speak to different types of visitors. You can use different templates to quickly build customized pages that’ll give them exactly what they’re looking for.

3. Put QA Checks in Place

Quality assurance is one step you should never skip, but it’s also the one you’ll be most tempted to skip. Don’t do it. Resist the urge. QA is key for ensuring a high-performing campaign.

Put yourself in your visitors’ shoes: how would you feel if you clicked on a link that went to a nonexistent page? Frustrated or annoyed? Definitely. Content with typos and broken links can create a bad first impression.

It’s what happened to Scott McLeod, chief of staff at Resident. He learned the hard way about the importance of QAing after running ads to a landing page that didn’t load. (It’s a big no-no considering you need to ensure your site loads as quickly as possible.)

His advice? Be extra mindful to check that you inspect every aspect of your campaign. Or, to put it another (bigger, bolder) way:

You need to provide a seamless user experience for your customers that will make ’em love you. Treat it like a first date: you want to please your prospects from the get-go so they’ll have more reason to want to keep dating you. (And maybe even marry you.) 

We specifically have the team follow from ad to checkout, especially for major sales or mass communications … Creating redundancy in the QA process or review process leads to less mishaps.

When you have ten other things to do, it can be tempting to call something done without going through the crucial last step of QAing it. But ensuring you take this time will save you a lot of headaches in the long run.

4. Add Automated Checks When You QA

While Scott recommends running QA checks, Derric Haynie, chief ecommerce technologist at Ecommerce Tech, takes it one step further. He suggests using automated checks to protect you from tiny errors that can cost you your ad spend. The best marketers do this to provide the best post-click experience from ad to landing page.

This realization didn’t come to Derric immediately, though. It’s something he learned after running a PPC campaign that drove to a dead 404 page. A small oversight that meant throwing $10K down the drain. (In McDonald’s terms, it’s equal to 40,000 Chicken McNuggets. A whole lotta nugs.)

Luckily, Google Ads includes final URLs to help make sure your ads are leading your prospects to the right landing page. Derric uses this field, especially for dynamic ads.

Nowadays, I’m using Google’s ‘Final URL’ column and either copy/pasting or exporting all the URLs to check the final destination works. They now have a landing page validation checker built in.

The Final URL is the address of the page in your website that people reach when they click your ad. (Source: Google)

Incorporate automated QA checks into your process wherever you can. You’ll minimize human error, and might even have some budget left over for a 10-piece McNugget. 

5. Validate New Ideas With Customer Research

These days, data needs to be the driving force behind any marketing strategy. It’s a must-have for any business’s growth and success. (If Obi-Wan Kenobi were a marketer, I’m sure he’d want you to use the data force.) 

But don’t take my word for it. Here’s Google:

Even Google reports that leading marketers believe how they apply their data is crucial to success. (Source: Think with Google)

Ask any great marketer, and they’ll tell you that they don’t make business decisions without the data to back it. It’s a best practice, but one we can easily forget.

Marc Bitanga, CEO at Agencio, almost committed an epic fail because a key stakeholder of a media company was determined to make a drastic change to their website without the data to support it. 

The stakeholder thought the change would lead to a big win. Marc, on the other hand, felt like it wasn’t a good idea. Working with his UX team, he conducted research to confirm his hunch. He recorded real-life feedback sessions with customers to validate the stakeholder’s requirements.

Turns out Marc’s intuition was right: the proposed changes would have led to a bad experience for website visitors. If anything, Marc is a prime example of why research is the key to making informed decisions. And Marc has learned his lesson:

I avoid similar fails today by conducting as much customer research as possible to improve customer centricity.

Remember to keep your customers at the heart of every marketing idea and decision so that you can determine if an idea is viable or not. It’s frequently the difference between crash-and-burn ideas and successful ones.

6. Test One Change at a Time

Great marketing comes from testing, analyzing, and iterating based on results. (It’s an art and a science.) As marketers, we’re always busy pushing campaigns out the door, but we need to remind ourselves not to get in over our heads. When testing, that means taking a step back and making changes one at a time, versus all at once. 

For instance, Casie Gillette, senior director of digital marketing at KoMarketing, redesigned a big website for a client that involved a ton of changes at once. Everything from updating URLs, switching CMS systems, and updating content. Her mistake?

We hadn’t tested moving a site to HTTPS and changing all of the URLs and content at the same time.

The modifications led to a massive loss in qualified traffic and leads all at once, plus a host of pesky technical issues. Casie knew page content revisions and testing were both necessary to improve relevance and ranking. To increase conversions, her team tested on-page tags, created guides to compete in SERPs, and even optimized their landing pages with CTAs, banners, and forms.

It was basically an all-out blitz to find what was working and how to replicate it across the site … It really came down to consistency, testing, and replication.

There’s no magical one-size-fits-all recipe for success. But you can focus your testing efforts rather than tackling everything at once. That way, you can identify what works and what doesn’t. (It’s a testing best practice.)

Keen to grow your conversion rates? With our landing pages, you can experiment on your messaging, page design, and forms to validate ideas and score more conversions with A/B testing.

7. Set Realistic Goals and Expectations

Goals are the building blocks for any marketer. They provide clarity and guidance for when you start putting together a marketing strategy and action plan. But making sure your goals are well-defined and realistic is often easier said than done, especially if you’re ambitious.

Sphoorti Bhandare, PR and content whisperer—yep, you read that right—prepared for a big store launch one month in advance. Despite her proactive planning, though, things started to fall apart one by one a week before they were set to go live.

With little time and no contingency plan, Sphoorti postponed the launch. While not ideal, it did help her realize where she failed:

We hugely underestimated the effort required to make the launch successful and didn’t really write down a crisis communication plan for worst-case scenarios.

Many things can go wrong on a marketing campaign. When you start a new project, ask yourself: do I have the time, resources, and budget I need to accomplish everything? Then set specific, realistic marketing goals and inform everyone of them. 

The biggest lesson I took from this was to set realistic goals and expectations and consistently monitor them. Not only for the marketing team, but for every department, vendor, and executive involved.

Having a crystal clear vision of what you want to achieve can help hold you and your team accountable within a given time frame. If you aren’t able to reach your goals in the end, that’s OK. The beauty of goal-setting is taking a step back and seeing how or where you can improve next time.

(via Isaac Smith on Unsplash)

8. Create Clear Content Briefs

You’ve got your strategy. You’ve got your buyer personas. Now you’ve got to whip together some content that supports this overall strategy and speaks directly to your buyers. Before you do anything, sitting down to create a clear content brief is one of the smartest time investments you can make. 

(Believe me, you’ll thank yourself later.)

The best marketers would agree that a content brief can paint a clear picture for anyone you work with. Taru Bhargava of Foundation Marketing is one of them. 

When she first started out as a content marketer, Taru commissioned freelance writers to contribute long-form articles. To save time, she only provided them with a topic. Little did she know that this approach would backfire. 

Guess what? The lack of a detailed brief resulted in commissioned articles that suffered in quality. And, even more importantly, it turned into an enormous waste of time and effort. Realizing her blunder, Taru now follows a framework to include everything that’s required for someone to know before they create any content—the voice and tone, target audience, competitors, keywords, internal links, and more. 

Sticking to a content brief and overcommunicating the expectations is always a good strategy when working with freelancers … Providing them with as much info as possible in the first go is the best way to avoid the to & fro of edits.

Creating a content brief as your north star helps everyone understand what you want to accomplish with a piece of content. A brief can take the guesswork out of content creation, saving you time and money. 

Taru’s secret is this content writing brief template from CoSchedule. (She swears by it, so you know it’s good.)

9. Promote Visibility Within Your Team

We live in a fast-paced marketing world. Timelines fluctuate. Campaigns change. Requests from different stakeholders come at any given moment. Communicating these changes to every member of your team can be a significant challenge.

For example, Eric Siu, CEO of Single Grain, made a $500K deal to run a promotional campaign for a SaaS company. The problem? He didn’t tell his team, which left everyone scrambling at the last minute when orders started rolling in. Oops. You can imagine his colleagues weren’t too happy.

Eric admits he failed, but shares what he took away from the experience:

I learned that inter-departmental communication is important. It was a marketing fail, yes. But because so much of marketing is evangelizing your own marketing within the company, I lost respect and trust.

Making others aware of the work you’re doing—especially if that work involves them—is the key. When there’s so many tasks on the go, we need to hear something several times before we process it. Be extra clear and overcommunicate, so no one you’re working with gets caught by surprise. Then keep open lines of communication between you and any team you’re working with.

(via youxventures at Unsplash)

10. Prioritize Projects Based on Potential Impact

Managing a laundry list of priorities is probably nothing new to you. You’ve got top-level business objectives, departmental strategic initiatives, and marketing priorities to think about. But selecting the priorities that will have the greatest impact can be very tricky—especially when you have pressure from stakeholders to pursue certain projects.  

Back in 2018, the Unbounce content team wondered if Call to Action Conference might warrant a digital magazine-style recap. We wanted to write recap material to extend the lifespan of the live event. And we were inspired by Montreal’s G2 conference and the amazing, physical print book their organizers use to commemorate the experience.

Excited, the Unbounce team jumped at the chance to create a ‘zine. But, as Unbounce’s Head of Content Marketing, Jennifer Pepper, says, “there were several other content projects I should have prioritized instead. Despite eagerness and stakeholders hoping to squeeze the most reuse out of our live event, there were more pressing content priorities and I should have a) trusted my gut and b) made a more solid case for working on the projects I knew could have a greater overall payoff for the business.”

Call to Action Magazine was filled with curated insights from the 2017 Call to Action Conference.

Want to experience CTAConf this year and raise your marketing IQ? Check out the conference and workshop agenda for September 2019. Tickets are still available.

Jen now prioritizes far more ruthlessly, having learned to advocate for the right work more vocally. Her ultimate takeaway?

If you own prioritization, it’s up to you to uncover the opportunities and make sure you’re making the strongest case to stakeholders on the right stuff to create. As a content lead, it’s about how you can educate stakeholders so they understand why some things are more worthy of your team’s time than others.

11. Don’t Sell Yourself Short

Whether you’re leading a big marketing team or just part of one, it’s easy to get lost in the shuffle. Different experts have different opinions, and not everybody is right 100% of the time. How do you manage them?

Kasey Bayne, head of marketing at DataTrue, faced a difficult situation early in her career. Someone she was working with wanted to break into a new market by doing a big trade show. With no lead time or reputation in that industry (not to mention a very tight budget) Kasey had significant doubts. She voiced her concerns at first, but, against her better judgment, eventually agreed to the move. 

The trade show turned out to be a flop. Kasey learned a valuable lesson nonetheless. “When you are the expert or marketing leader in your team, it’s important to be strong about your recommendations,” she says.

Prepare your case, bring your data, and your experience to present a solid recommendation as best as you can without being so quick to give in to others.

No matter your age or years of experience in the industry, trust your knowledge as a marketer. Don’t be afraid to stand up for yourself and voice your concerns or suggestions. (As Marc Bitanga would say, it’s even better when you’re able to back up those arguments with data.) 

If at First You Fail, Try Again!

Everybody makes mistakes. Everybody has one of those days.

From these 11 examples, we can see how even experienced, expert marketers can fail. (And fail again.) But, crucially, they transform their mistakes into insights about what not to do in the future. 

So if you happen to make a mistake—and you probably will—think of it as a learning opportunity. No need to wrap yourself in a blanket of shame; own your failures and turn them into your own personal ‘aha!’ moment. 

Go on—take chances, make mistakes, and get messy.

You’ll be in great company. 

Have marketing fails you’d like to share? Leave them in the comments below, and let us know what you learned.

from Marketing https://unbounce.com/campaign-strategy/marketing-fails-and-lessons-learned/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[kennethmontiveros]

11 Marketing Experts Share Their Marketing Fails (and Lessons Learned)

If you’ve ever failed in marketing, you’re not alone.

Nobody likes to mess up, but we’ve all been there. And what sets truly remarkable marketers apart from everyone else isn’t that they don’t ever make mistakes. They do. It’s just that they learn from their failures. 

As Barack Obama put it, “You can’t let your failures define you. You have to let your failures teach you.” (Thanks, Obama. No, really. Thank you.) 

With that in mind, we asked 11 experienced marketers to share what they’ve learned from their past blunders. These pros are living proof that we can learn as much from those times things didn’t go our way as we can from our biggest wins. As you’ll see, getting it wrong helped them grow their business, develop a customer-focused philosophy, improve their abilities as a leader, and much more.

So let’s dive right in.

Jump Straight to a Lesson Learned from a Marketing Fail

Target the Right Keywords

Develop Buyer Personas to Inform Your Marketing

Put QA Checks in Place

Add Automated Checks When You QA

Validate New Ideas with Customer Research

Test One Change At a Time

Set Realistic Goals and Expectations

Create Clear Content Briefs

Promote Visibility Within Your Team

Prioritize Projects Based on Potential Impact

Don’t Sell Yourself Short

1. Target the Right Keywords

Every marketer knows the value of organic keywords. Understanding what your target audience is searching for (and how you can rank for specific keywords) can help you optimize your campaigns and develop an effective SEO strategy. 

But what if a piece of content doesn’t rank at all? What if it ends up ten pages deep in the SERPs? What if it forever sinks to the deep Mariana Trench of Google?

Take Andy Crestodina, co-founder of Orbit Media Studios. He spent over 20 hours on a 4,100+ word article (and a 12-minute video) only to have it fail as a piece of organic content. He figured he’d optimize it for a popular phrase, get it to rank, and win a steady stream of traffic. But that never happened. 

Andy owns up to why he failed:

I didn’t dig in deep enough while checking competition. As it turns out, the high ranking pages have huge numbers of inbound links. Even though the difficulty score was low, the linking root domain numbers were off the charts. But I never checked.

Andy learned a powerful lesson: your content won’t rank by magic.

You need to put hard work into targeting the right phrases that can compound traffic over time. To avoid losing your content in Google search obscurity, take the time to research the keywords you want to target first. 

Hit the sweet spot for keywords by researching phrases that have a good mix of search volume, general intent, and popularity among competitors. (Source: Orbit Media)

And don’t just look at search volume. Make sure you check out how your competitors rank to ensure you’re ready to take them on. You want to know if you’re going up against the Mohammed Ali of content before you throw your hat into the ring.

2. Develop Buyer Personas to Inform Your Marketing

Buyer personas go hand-in-hand with your marketing strategy. They’re the needle to your strategy’s thread. The arrow to your bow. The Kim to your Kanye. (You see where I’m going with this.) 

Defining the ideal customer audience you want to attract will help you market to them in the best way possible. However, to build robust, accurate buyer personas, you need one thing: data. 

Early on in his career, Brandon Gains, VP of marketing at MonetizeMore, created personas from gut-feeling alone. He didn’t validate them through qualitative research, surveys, and interviews. And without a formal process to gather internal and external data points, he failed to involve a large customer base in his company’s marketing and product direction. 

But to get internal buy-in from department heads, he needed more than his gut feeling. He needed to fix how his company crafted buyer personas:

We reignited our user research process and developed more of a scientific approach that incorporates internal and external research into concrete deliverables that I use across the company.

Like Brandon says, you need to ground your buyer personas in research and data—a.k.a. the real world (and, no, not the MTV version). Even though it’s nitty-gritty work, setting up customer interviews and internal discussions across your sales, customer success, product, and marketing teams will pay off in the long run. You’ll be able to better determine your objectives and anticipate consumer needs. 

With buyer personas, you can know how to tailor your content to segmented audiences who have different preferences, challenges, and pain points.  (Source: Unbounce)

Like any dynamic duo, buyer personas can also help you create segmented landing pages that speak to different types of visitors. You can use different templates to quickly build customized pages that’ll give them exactly what they’re looking for.

3. Put QA Checks in Place

Quality assurance is one step you should never skip, but it’s also the one you’ll be most tempted to skip. Don’t do it. Resist the urge. QA is key for ensuring a high-performing campaign.

Put yourself in your visitors’ shoes: how would you feel if you clicked on a link that went to a nonexistent page? Frustrated or annoyed? Definitely. Content with typos and broken links can create a bad first impression.

It’s what happened to Scott McLeod, chief of staff at Resident. He learned the hard way about the importance of QAing after running ads to a landing page that didn’t load. (It’s a big no-no considering you need to ensure your site loads as quickly as possible.)

His advice? Be extra mindful to check that you inspect every aspect of your campaign. Or, to put it another (bigger, bolder) way:

You need to provide a seamless user experience for your customers that will make ’em love you. Treat it like a first date: you want to please your prospects from the get-go so they’ll have more reason to want to keep dating you. (And maybe even marry you.) 

We specifically have the team follow from ad to checkout, especially for major sales or mass communications … Creating redundancy in the QA process or review process leads to less mishaps.

When you have ten other things to do, it can be tempting to call something done without going through the crucial last step of QAing it. But ensuring you take this time will save you a lot of headaches in the long run.

4. Add Automated Checks When You QA

While Scott recommends running QA checks, Derric Haynie, chief ecommerce technologist at Ecommerce Tech, takes it one step further. He suggests using automated checks to protect you from tiny errors that can cost you your ad spend. The best marketers do this to provide the best post-click experience from ad to landing page.

This realization didn’t come to Derric immediately, though. It’s something he learned after running a PPC campaign that drove to a dead 404 page. A small oversight that meant throwing $10K down the drain. (In McDonald’s terms, it’s equal to 40,000 Chicken McNuggets. A whole lotta nugs.)

Luckily, Google Ads includes final URLs to help make sure your ads are leading your prospects to the right landing page. Derric uses this field, especially for dynamic ads.

Nowadays, I’m using Google’s ‘Final URL’ column and either copy/pasting or exporting all the URLs to check the final destination works. They now have a landing page validation checker built in.

The Final URL is the address of the page in your website that people reach when they click your ad. (Source: Google)

Incorporate automated QA checks into your process wherever you can. You’ll minimize human error, and might even have some budget left over for a 10-piece McNugget. 

5. Validate New Ideas With Customer Research

These days, data needs to be the driving force behind any marketing strategy. It’s a must-have for any business’s growth and success. (If Obi-Wan Kenobi were a marketer, I’m sure he’d want you to use the data force.) 

But don’t take my word for it. Here’s Google:

Even Google reports that leading marketers believe how they apply their data is crucial to success. (Source: Think with Google)

Ask any great marketer, and they’ll tell you that they don’t make business decisions without the data to back it. It’s a best practice, but one we can easily forget.

Marc Bitanga, CEO at Agencio, almost committed an epic fail because a key stakeholder of a media company was determined to make a drastic change to their website without the data to support it. 

The stakeholder thought the change would lead to a big win. Marc, on the other hand, felt like it wasn’t a good idea. Working with his UX team, he conducted research to confirm his hunch. He recorded real-life feedback sessions with customers to validate the stakeholder’s requirements.

Turns out Marc’s intuition was right: the proposed changes would have led to a bad experience for website visitors. If anything, Marc is a prime example of why research is the key to making informed decisions. And Marc has learned his lesson:

I avoid similar fails today by conducting as much customer research as possible to improve customer centricity.

Remember to keep your customers at the heart of every marketing idea and decision so that you can determine if an idea is viable or not. It’s frequently the difference between crash-and-burn ideas and successful ones.

6. Test One Change at a Time

Great marketing comes from testing, analyzing, and iterating based on results. (It’s an art and a science.) As marketers, we’re always busy pushing campaigns out the door, but we need to remind ourselves not to get in over our heads. When testing, that means taking a step back and making changes one at a time, versus all at once. 

For instance, Casie Gillette, senior director of digital marketing at KoMarketing, redesigned a big website for a client that involved a ton of changes at once. Everything from updating URLs, switching CMS systems, and updating content. Her mistake?

We hadn’t tested moving a site to HTTPS and changing all of the URLs and content at the same time.

The modifications led to a massive loss in qualified traffic and leads all at once, plus a host of pesky technical issues. Casie knew page content revisions and testing were both necessary to improve relevance and ranking. To increase conversions, her team tested on-page tags, created guides to compete in SERPs, and even optimized their landing pages with CTAs, banners, and forms.

It was basically an all-out blitz to find what was working and how to replicate it across the site … It really came down to consistency, testing, and replication.

There’s no magical one-size-fits-all recipe for success. But you can focus your testing efforts rather than tackling everything at once. That way, you can identify what works and what doesn’t. (It’s a testing best practice.)

Keen to grow your conversion rates? With our landing pages, you can experiment on your messaging, page design, and forms to validate ideas and score more conversions with A/B testing.

7. Set Realistic Goals and Expectations

Goals are the building blocks for any marketer. They provide clarity and guidance for when you start putting together a marketing strategy and action plan. But making sure your goals are well-defined and realistic is often easier said than done, especially if you’re ambitious.

Sphoorti Bhandare, PR and content whisperer—yep, you read that right—prepared for a big store launch one month in advance. Despite her proactive planning, though, things started to fall apart one by one a week before they were set to go live.

With little time and no contingency plan, Sphoorti postponed the launch. While not ideal, it did help her realize where she failed:

We hugely underestimated the effort required to make the launch successful and didn’t really write down a crisis communication plan for worst-case scenarios.

Many things can go wrong on a marketing campaign. When you start a new project, ask yourself: do I have the time, resources, and budget I need to accomplish everything? Then set specific, realistic marketing goals and inform everyone of them. 

The biggest lesson I took from this was to set realistic goals and expectations and consistently monitor them. Not only for the marketing team, but for every department, vendor, and executive involved.

Having a crystal clear vision of what you want to achieve can help hold you and your team accountable within a given time frame. If you aren’t able to reach your goals in the end, that’s OK. The beauty of goal-setting is taking a step back and seeing how or where you can improve next time.

(via Isaac Smith on Unsplash)

8. Create Clear Content Briefs

You’ve got your strategy. You’ve got your buyer personas. Now you’ve got to whip together some content that supports this overall strategy and speaks directly to your buyers. Before you do anything, sitting down to create a clear content brief is one of the smartest time investments you can make. 

(Believe me, you’ll thank yourself later.)

The best marketers would agree that a content brief can paint a clear picture for anyone you work with. Taru Bhargava of Foundation Marketing is one of them. 

When she first started out as a content marketer, Taru commissioned freelance writers to contribute long-form articles. To save time, she only provided them with a topic. Little did she know that this approach would backfire. 

Guess what? The lack of a detailed brief resulted in commissioned articles that suffered in quality. And, even more importantly, it turned into an enormous waste of time and effort. Realizing her blunder, Taru now follows a framework to include everything that’s required for someone to know before they create any content—the voice and tone, target audience, competitors, keywords, internal links, and more. 

Sticking to a content brief and overcommunicating the expectations is always a good strategy when working with freelancers … Providing them with as much info as possible in the first go is the best way to avoid the to & fro of edits.

Creating a content brief as your north star helps everyone understand what you want to accomplish with a piece of content. A brief can take the guesswork out of content creation, saving you time and money. 

Taru’s secret is this content writing brief template from CoSchedule. (She swears by it, so you know it’s good.)

9. Promote Visibility Within Your Team

We live in a fast-paced marketing world. Timelines fluctuate. Campaigns change. Requests from different stakeholders come at any given moment. Communicating these changes to every member of your team can be a significant challenge.

For example, Eric Siu, CEO of Single Grain, made a $500K deal to run a promotional campaign for a SaaS company. The problem? He didn’t tell his team, which left everyone scrambling at the last minute when orders started rolling in. Oops. You can imagine his colleagues weren’t too happy.

Eric admits he failed, but shares what he took away from the experience:

I learned that inter-departmental communication is important. It was a marketing fail, yes. But because so much of marketing is evangelizing your own marketing within the company, I lost respect and trust.

Making others aware of the work you’re doing—especially if that work involves them—is the key. When there’s so many tasks on the go, we need to hear something several times before we process it. Be extra clear and overcommunicate, so no one you’re working with gets caught by surprise. Then keep open lines of communication between you and any team you’re working with.

(via youxventures at Unsplash)

10. Prioritize Projects Based on Potential Impact

Managing a laundry list of priorities is probably nothing new to you. You’ve got top-level business objectives, departmental strategic initiatives, and marketing priorities to think about. But selecting the priorities that will have the greatest impact can be very tricky—especially when you have pressure from stakeholders to pursue certain projects.  

Back in 2018, the Unbounce content team wondered if Call to Action Conference might warrant a digital magazine-style recap. We wanted to write recap material to extend the lifespan of the live event. And we were inspired by Montreal’s G2 conference and the amazing, physical print book their organizers use to commemorate the experience.

Excited, the Unbounce team jumped at the chance to create a ‘zine. But, as Unbounce’s Head of Content Marketing, Jennifer Pepper, says, “there were several other content projects I should have prioritized instead. Despite eagerness and stakeholders hoping to squeeze the most reuse out of our live event, there were more pressing content priorities and I should have a) trusted my gut and b) made a more solid case for working on the projects I knew could have a greater overall payoff for the business.”

Call to Action Magazine was filled with curated insights from the 2017 Call to Action Conference.

Want to experience CTAConf this year and raise your marketing IQ? Check out the conference and workshop agenda for September 2019. Tickets are still available.

Jen now prioritizes far more ruthlessly, having learned to advocate for the right work more vocally. Her ultimate takeaway?

If you own prioritization, it’s up to you to uncover the opportunities and make sure you’re making the strongest case to stakeholders on the right stuff to create. As a content lead, it’s about how you can educate stakeholders so they understand why some things are more worthy of your team’s time than others.

11. Don’t Sell Yourself Short

Whether you’re leading a big marketing team or just part of one, it’s easy to get lost in the shuffle. Different experts have different opinions, and not everybody is right 100% of the time. How do you manage them?

Kasey Bayne, head of marketing at DataTrue, faced a difficult situation early in her career. Someone she was working with wanted to break into a new market by doing a big trade show. With no lead time or reputation in that industry (not to mention a very tight budget) Kasey had significant doubts. She voiced her concerns at first, but, against her better judgment, eventually agreed to the move. 

The trade show turned out to be a flop. Kasey learned a valuable lesson nonetheless. “When you are the expert or marketing leader in your team, it’s important to be strong about your recommendations,” she says.

Prepare your case, bring your data, and your experience to present a solid recommendation as best as you can without being so quick to give in to others.

No matter your age or years of experience in the industry, trust your knowledge as a marketer. Don’t be afraid to stand up for yourself and voice your concerns or suggestions. (As Marc Bitanga would say, it’s even better when you’re able to back up those arguments with data.) 

If at First You Fail, Try Again!

Everybody makes mistakes. Everybody has one of those days.

From these 11 examples, we can see how even experienced, expert marketers can fail. (And fail again.) But, crucially, they transform their mistakes into insights about what not to do in the future. 

So if you happen to make a mistake—and you probably will—think of it as a learning opportunity. No need to wrap yourself in a blanket of shame; own your failures and turn them into your own personal ‘aha!’ moment. 

Go on—take chances, make mistakes, and get messy.

You’ll be in great company. 

Have marketing fails you’d like to share? Leave them in the comments below, and let us know what you learned.

11 Marketing Experts Share Their Marketing Fails (and Lessons Learned) published first on http://nickpontemktg.blogspot.com/

[reviewandbonuss]

11 Marketing Experts Share Their Marketing Fails (and Lessons Learned)

If you’ve ever failed in marketing, you’re not alone.

Nobody likes to mess up, but we’ve all been there. And what sets truly remarkable marketers apart from everyone else isn’t that they don’t ever make mistakes. They do. It’s just that they learn from their failures. 

As Barack Obama put it, “You can’t let your failures define you. You have to let your failures teach you.” (Thanks, Obama. No, really. Thank you.) 

With that in mind, we asked 11 experienced marketers to share what they’ve learned from their past blunders. These pros are living proof that we can learn as much from those times things didn’t go our way as we can from our biggest wins. As you’ll see, getting it wrong helped them grow their business, develop a customer-focused philosophy, improve their abilities as a leader, and much more.

So let’s dive right in.

Jump Straight to a Lesson Learned from a Marketing Fail

Target the Right Keywords

Develop Buyer Personas to Inform Your Marketing

Put QA Checks in Place

Add Automated Checks When You QA

Validate New Ideas with Customer Research

Test One Change At a Time

Set Realistic Goals and Expectations

Create Clear Content Briefs

Promote Visibility Within Your Team

Prioritize Projects Based on Potential Impact

Don’t Sell Yourself Short

1. Target the Right Keywords

Every marketer knows the value of organic keywords. Understanding what your target audience is searching for (and how you can rank for specific keywords) can help you optimize your campaigns and develop an effective SEO strategy. 

But what if a piece of content doesn’t rank at all? What if it ends up ten pages deep in the SERPs? What if it forever sinks to the deep Mariana Trench of Google?

Take Andy Crestodina, co-founder of Orbit Media Studios. He spent over 20 hours on a 4,100+ word article (and a 12-minute video) only to have it fail as a piece of organic content. He figured he’d optimize it for a popular phrase, get it to rank, and win a steady stream of traffic. But that never happened. 

Andy owns up to why he failed:

I didn’t dig in deep enough while checking competition. As it turns out, the high ranking pages have huge numbers of inbound links. Even though the difficulty score was low, the linking root domain numbers were off the charts. But I never checked.

Andy learned a powerful lesson: your content won’t rank by magic.

You need to put hard work into targeting the right phrases that can compound traffic over time. To avoid losing your content in Google search obscurity, take the time to research the keywords you want to target first. 

Hit the sweet spot for keywords by researching phrases that have a good mix of search volume, general intent, and popularity among competitors. (Source: Orbit Media)

And don’t just look at search volume. Make sure you check out how your competitors rank to ensure you’re ready to take them on. You want to know if you’re going up against the Mohammed Ali of content before you throw your hat into the ring.

2. Develop Buyer Personas to Inform Your Marketing

Buyer personas go hand-in-hand with your marketing strategy. They’re the needle to your strategy’s thread. The arrow to your bow. The Kim to your Kanye. (You see where I’m going with this.) 

Defining the ideal customer audience you want to attract will help you market to them in the best way possible. However, to build robust, accurate buyer personas, you need one thing: data. 

Early on in his career, Brandon Gains, VP of marketing at MonetizeMore, created personas from gut-feeling alone. He didn’t validate them through qualitative research, surveys, and interviews. And without a formal process to gather internal and external data points, he failed to involve a large customer base in his company’s marketing and product direction. 

But to get internal buy-in from department heads, he needed more than his gut feeling. He needed to fix how his company crafted buyer personas:

We reignited our user research process and developed more of a scientific approach that incorporates internal and external research into concrete deliverables that I use across the company.

Like Brandon says, you need to ground your buyer personas in research and data—a.k.a. the real world (and, no, not the MTV version). Even though it’s nitty-gritty work, setting up customer interviews and internal discussions across your sales, customer success, product, and marketing teams will pay off in the long run. You’ll be able to better determine your objectives and anticipate consumer needs. 

With buyer personas, you can know how to tailor your content to segmented audiences who have different preferences, challenges, and pain points.  (Source: Unbounce)

Like any dynamic duo, buyer personas can also help you create segmented landing pages that speak to different types of visitors. You can use different templates to quickly build customized pages that’ll give them exactly what they’re looking for.

3. Put QA Checks in Place

Quality assurance is one step you should never skip, but it’s also the one you’ll be most tempted to skip. Don’t do it. Resist the urge. QA is key for ensuring a high-performing campaign.

Put yourself in your visitors’ shoes: how would you feel if you clicked on a link that went to a nonexistent page? Frustrated or annoyed? Definitely. Content with typos and broken links can create a bad first impression.

It’s what happened to Scott McLeod, chief of staff at Resident. He learned the hard way about the importance of QAing after running ads to a landing page that didn’t load. (It’s a big no-no considering you need to ensure your site loads as quickly as possible.)

His advice? Be extra mindful to check that you inspect every aspect of your campaign. Or, to put it another (bigger, bolder) way:

You need to provide a seamless user experience for your customers that will make ’em love you. Treat it like a first date: you want to please your prospects from the get-go so they’ll have more reason to want to keep dating you. (And maybe even marry you.) 

We specifically have the team follow from ad to checkout, especially for major sales or mass communications … Creating redundancy in the QA process or review process leads to less mishaps.

When you have ten other things to do, it can be tempting to call something done without going through the crucial last step of QAing it. But ensuring you take this time will save you a lot of headaches in the long run.

4. Add Automated Checks When You QA

While Scott recommends running QA checks, Derric Haynie, chief ecommerce technologist at Ecommerce Tech, takes it one step further. He suggests using automated checks to protect you from tiny errors that can cost you your ad spend. The best marketers do this to provide the best post-click experience from ad to landing page.

This realization didn’t come to Derric immediately, though. It’s something he learned after running a PPC campaign that drove to a dead 404 page. A small oversight that meant throwing $10K down the drain. (In McDonald’s terms, it’s equal to 40,000 Chicken McNuggets. A whole lotta nugs.)

Luckily, Google Ads includes final URLs to help make sure your ads are leading your prospects to the right landing page. Derric uses this field, especially for dynamic ads.

Nowadays, I’m using Google’s ‘Final URL’ column and either copy/pasting or exporting all the URLs to check the final destination works. They now have a landing page validation checker built in.

The Final URL is the address of the page in your website that people reach when they click your ad. (Source: Google)

Incorporate automated QA checks into your process wherever you can. You’ll minimize human error, and might even have some budget left over for a 10-piece McNugget. 

5. Validate New Ideas With Customer Research

These days, data needs to be the driving force behind any marketing strategy. It’s a must-have for any business’s growth and success. (If Obi-Wan Kenobi were a marketer, I’m sure he’d want you to use the data force.) 

But don’t take my word for it. Here’s Google:

Even Google reports that leading marketers believe how they apply their data is crucial to success. (Source: Think with Google)

Ask any great marketer, and they’ll tell you that they don’t make business decisions without the data to back it. It’s a best practice, but one we can easily forget.

Marc Bitanga, CEO at Agencio, almost committed an epic fail because a key stakeholder of a media company was determined to make a drastic change to their website without the data to support it. 

The stakeholder thought the change would lead to a big win. Marc, on the other hand, felt like it wasn’t a good idea. Working with his UX team, he conducted research to confirm his hunch. He recorded real-life feedback sessions with customers to validate the stakeholder’s requirements.

Turns out Marc’s intuition was right: the proposed changes would have led to a bad experience for website visitors. If anything, Marc is a prime example of why research is the key to making informed decisions. And Marc has learned his lesson:

I avoid similar fails today by conducting as much customer research as possible to improve customer centricity.

Remember to keep your customers at the heart of every marketing idea and decision so that you can determine if an idea is viable or not. It’s frequently the difference between crash-and-burn ideas and successful ones.

6. Test One Change at a Time

Great marketing comes from testing, analyzing, and iterating based on results. (It’s an art and a science.) As marketers, we’re always busy pushing campaigns out the door, but we need to remind ourselves not to get in over our heads. When testing, that means taking a step back and making changes one at a time, versus all at once. 

For instance, Casie Gillette, senior director of digital marketing at KoMarketing, redesigned a big website for a client that involved a ton of changes at once. Everything from updating URLs, switching CMS systems, and updating content. Her mistake?

We hadn’t tested moving a site to HTTPS and changing all of the URLs and content at the same time.

The modifications led to a massive loss in qualified traffic and leads all at once, plus a host of pesky technical issues. Casie knew page content revisions and testing were both necessary to improve relevance and ranking. To increase conversions, her team tested on-page tags, created guides to compete in SERPs, and even optimized their landing pages with CTAs, banners, and forms.

It was basically an all-out blitz to find what was working and how to replicate it across the site … It really came down to consistency, testing, and replication.

There’s no magical one-size-fits-all recipe for success. But you can focus your testing efforts rather than tackling everything at once. That way, you can identify what works and what doesn’t. (It’s a testing best practice.)

Keen to grow your conversion rates? With our landing pages, you can experiment on your messaging, page design, and forms to validate ideas and score more conversions with A/B testing.

7. Set Realistic Goals and Expectations

Goals are the building blocks for any marketer. They provide clarity and guidance for when you start putting together a marketing strategy and action plan. But making sure your goals are well-defined and realistic is often easier said than done, especially if you’re ambitious.

Sphoorti Bhandare, PR and content whisperer—yep, you read that right—prepared for a big store launch one month in advance. Despite her proactive planning, though, things started to fall apart one by one a week before they were set to go live.

With little time and no contingency plan, Sphoorti postponed the launch. While not ideal, it did help her realize where she failed:

We hugely underestimated the effort required to make the launch successful and didn’t really write down a crisis communication plan for worst-case scenarios.

Many things can go wrong on a marketing campaign. When you start a new project, ask yourself: do I have the time, resources, and budget I need to accomplish everything? Then set specific, realistic marketing goals and inform everyone of them. 

The biggest lesson I took from this was to set realistic goals and expectations and consistently monitor them. Not only for the marketing team, but for every department, vendor, and executive involved.

Having a crystal clear vision of what you want to achieve can help hold you and your team accountable within a given time frame. If you aren’t able to reach your goals in the end, that’s OK. The beauty of goal-setting is taking a step back and seeing how or where you can improve next time.

(via Isaac Smith on Unsplash)

8. Create Clear Content Briefs

You’ve got your strategy. You’ve got your buyer personas. Now you’ve got to whip together some content that supports this overall strategy and speaks directly to your buyers. Before you do anything, sitting down to create a clear content brief is one of the smartest time investments you can make. 

(Believe me, you’ll thank yourself later.)

The best marketers would agree that a content brief can paint a clear picture for anyone you work with. Taru Bhargava of Foundation Marketing is one of them. 

When she first started out as a content marketer, Taru commissioned freelance writers to contribute long-form articles. To save time, she only provided them with a topic. Little did she know that this approach would backfire. 

Guess what? The lack of a detailed brief resulted in commissioned articles that suffered in quality. And, even more importantly, it turned into an enormous waste of time and effort. Realizing her blunder, Taru now follows a framework to include everything that’s required for someone to know before they create any content—the voice and tone, target audience, competitors, keywords, internal links, and more. 

Sticking to a content brief and overcommunicating the expectations is always a good strategy when working with freelancers … Providing them with as much info as possible in the first go is the best way to avoid the to & fro of edits.

Creating a content brief as your north star helps everyone understand what you want to accomplish with a piece of content. A brief can take the guesswork out of content creation, saving you time and money. 

Taru’s secret is this content writing brief template from CoSchedule. (She swears by it, so you know it’s good.)

9. Promote Visibility Within Your Team

We live in a fast-paced marketing world. Timelines fluctuate. Campaigns change. Requests from different stakeholders come at any given moment. Communicating these changes to every member of your team can be a significant challenge.

For example, Eric Siu, CEO of Single Grain, made a $500K deal to run a promotional campaign for a SaaS company. The problem? He didn’t tell his team, which left everyone scrambling at the last minute when orders started rolling in. Oops. You can imagine his colleagues weren’t too happy.

Eric admits he failed, but shares what he took away from the experience:

I learned that inter-departmental communication is important. It was a marketing fail, yes. But because so much of marketing is evangelizing your own marketing within the company, I lost respect and trust.

Making others aware of the work you’re doing—especially if that work involves them—is the key. When there’s so many tasks on the go, we need to hear something several times before we process it. Be extra clear and overcommunicate, so no one you’re working with gets caught by surprise. Then keep open lines of communication between you and any team you’re working with.

(via youxventures at Unsplash)

10. Prioritize Projects Based on Potential Impact

Managing a laundry list of priorities is probably nothing new to you. You’ve got top-level business objectives, departmental strategic initiatives, and marketing priorities to think about. But selecting the priorities that will have the greatest impact can be very tricky—especially when you have pressure from stakeholders to pursue certain projects.  

Back in 2018, the Unbounce content team wondered if Call to Action Conference might warrant a digital magazine-style recap. We wanted to write recap material to extend the lifespan of the live event. And we were inspired by Montreal’s G2 conference and the amazing, physical print book their organizers use to commemorate the experience.

Excited, the Unbounce team jumped at the chance to create a ‘zine. But, as Unbounce’s Head of Content Marketing, Jennifer Pepper, says, “there were several other content projects I should have prioritized instead. Despite eagerness and stakeholders hoping to squeeze the most reuse out of our live event, there were more pressing content priorities and I should have a) trusted my gut and b) made a more solid case for working on the projects I knew could have a greater overall payoff for the business.”

Call to Action Magazine was filled with curated insights from the 2017 Call to Action Conference.

Want to experience CTAConf this year and raise your marketing IQ? Check out the conference and workshop agenda for September 2019. Tickets are still available.

Jen now prioritizes far more ruthlessly, having learned to advocate for the right work more vocally. Her ultimate takeaway?

If you own prioritization, it’s up to you to uncover the opportunities and make sure you’re making the strongest case to stakeholders on the right stuff to create. As a content lead, it’s about how you can educate stakeholders so they understand why some things are more worthy of your team’s time than others.

11. Don’t Sell Yourself Short

Whether you’re leading a big marketing team or just part of one, it’s easy to get lost in the shuffle. Different experts have different opinions, and not everybody is right 100% of the time. How do you manage them?

Kasey Bayne, head of marketing at DataTrue, faced a difficult situation early in her career. Someone she was working with wanted to break into a new market by doing a big trade show. With no lead time or reputation in that industry (not to mention a very tight budget) Kasey had significant doubts. She voiced her concerns at first, but, against her better judgment, eventually agreed to the move. 

The trade show turned out to be a flop. Kasey learned a valuable lesson nonetheless. “When you are the expert or marketing leader in your team, it’s important to be strong about your recommendations,” she says.

Prepare your case, bring your data, and your experience to present a solid recommendation as best as you can without being so quick to give in to others.

No matter your age or years of experience in the industry, trust your knowledge as a marketer. Don’t be afraid to stand up for yourself and voice your concerns or suggestions. (As Marc Bitanga would say, it’s even better when you’re able to back up those arguments with data.) 

If at First You Fail, Try Again!

Everybody makes mistakes. Everybody has one of those days.

From these 11 examples, we can see how even experienced, expert marketers can fail. (And fail again.) But, crucially, they transform their mistakes into insights about what not to do in the future. 

So if you happen to make a mistake—and you probably will—think of it as a learning opportunity. No need to wrap yourself in a blanket of shame; own your failures and turn them into your own personal ‘aha!’ moment. 

Go on—take chances, make mistakes, and get messy.

You’ll be in great company. 

Have marketing fails you’d like to share? Leave them in the comments below, and let us know what you learned.

https://unbounce.com/campaign-strategy/marketing-fails-and-lessons-learned/

[annaxkeating]

11 Marketing Experts Share Their Marketing Fails (and Lessons Learned)

If you’ve ever failed in marketing, you’re not alone.

Nobody likes to mess up, but we’ve all been there. And what sets truly remarkable marketers apart from everyone else isn’t that they don’t ever make mistakes. They do. It’s just that they learn from their failures. 

As Barack Obama put it, “You can’t let your failures define you. You have to let your failures teach you.” (Thanks, Obama. No, really. Thank you.) 

With that in mind, we asked 11 experienced marketers to share what they’ve learned from their past blunders. These pros are living proof that we can learn as much from those times things didn’t go our way as we can from our biggest wins. As you’ll see, getting it wrong helped them grow their business, develop a customer-focused philosophy, improve their abilities as a leader, and much more.

So let’s dive right in.

Jump Straight to a Lesson Learned from a Marketing Fail

Target the Right Keywords

Develop Buyer Personas to Inform Your Marketing

Put QA Checks in Place

Add Automated Checks When You QA

Validate New Ideas with Customer Research

Test One Change At a Time

Set Realistic Goals and Expectations

Create Clear Content Briefs

Promote Visibility Within Your Team

Prioritize Projects Based on Potential Impact

Don’t Sell Yourself Short

1. Target the Right Keywords

Every marketer knows the value of organic keywords. Understanding what your target audience is searching for (and how you can rank for specific keywords) can help you optimize your campaigns and develop an effective SEO strategy. 

But what if a piece of content doesn’t rank at all? What if it ends up ten pages deep in the SERPs? What if it forever sinks to the deep Mariana Trench of Google?

Take Andy Crestodina, co-founder of Orbit Media Studios. He spent over 20 hours on a 4,100+ word article (and a 12-minute video) only to have it fail as a piece of organic content. He figured he’d optimize it for a popular phrase, get it to rank, and win a steady stream of traffic. But that never happened. 

Andy owns up to why he failed:

I didn’t dig in deep enough while checking competition. As it turns out, the high ranking pages have huge numbers of inbound links. Even though the difficulty score was low, the linking root domain numbers were off the charts. But I never checked.

Andy learned a powerful lesson: your content won’t rank by magic.

You need to put hard work into targeting the right phrases that can compound traffic over time. To avoid losing your content in Google search obscurity, take the time to research the keywords you want to target first. 

Hit the sweet spot for keywords by researching phrases that have a good mix of search volume, general intent, and popularity among competitors. (Source: Orbit Media)

And don’t just look at search volume. Make sure you check out how your competitors rank to ensure you’re ready to take them on. You want to know if you’re going up against the Mohammed Ali of content before you throw your hat into the ring.

2. Develop Buyer Personas to Inform Your Marketing

Buyer personas go hand-in-hand with your marketing strategy. They’re the needle to your strategy’s thread. The arrow to your bow. The Kim to your Kanye. (You see where I’m going with this.) 

Defining the ideal customer audience you want to attract will help you market to them in the best way possible. However, to build robust, accurate buyer personas, you need one thing: data. 

Early on in his career, Brandon Gains, VP of marketing at MonetizeMore, created personas from gut-feeling alone. He didn’t validate them through qualitative research, surveys, and interviews. And without a formal process to gather internal and external data points, he failed to involve a large customer base in his company’s marketing and product direction. 

But to get internal buy-in from department heads, he needed more than his gut feeling. He needed to fix how his company crafted buyer personas:

We reignited our user research process and developed more of a scientific approach that incorporates internal and external research into concrete deliverables that I use across the company.

Like Brandon says, you need to ground your buyer personas in research and data—a.k.a. the real world (and, no, not the MTV version). Even though it’s nitty-gritty work, setting up customer interviews and internal discussions across your sales, customer success, product, and marketing teams will pay off in the long run. You’ll be able to better determine your objectives and anticipate consumer needs. 

With buyer personas, you can know how to tailor your content to segmented audiences who have different preferences, challenges, and pain points.  (Source: Unbounce)

Like any dynamic duo, buyer personas can also help you create segmented landing pages that speak to different types of visitors. You can use different templates to quickly build customized pages that’ll give them exactly what they’re looking for.

3. Put QA Checks in Place

Quality assurance is one step you should never skip, but it’s also the one you’ll be most tempted to skip. Don’t do it. Resist the urge. QA is key for ensuring a high-performing campaign.

Put yourself in your visitors’ shoes: how would you feel if you clicked on a link that went to a nonexistent page? Frustrated or annoyed? Definitely. Content with typos and broken links can create a bad first impression.

It’s what happened to Scott McLeod, chief of staff at Resident. He learned the hard way about the importance of QAing after running ads to a landing page that didn’t load. (It’s a big no-no considering you need to ensure your site loads as quickly as possible.)

His advice? Be extra mindful to check that you inspect every aspect of your campaign. Or, to put it another (bigger, bolder) way:

You need to provide a seamless user experience for your customers that will make ’em love you. Treat it like a first date: you want to please your prospects from the get-go so they’ll have more reason to want to keep dating you. (And maybe even marry you.) 

We specifically have the team follow from ad to checkout, especially for major sales or mass communications … Creating redundancy in the QA process or review process leads to less mishaps.

When you have ten other things to do, it can be tempting to call something done without going through the crucial last step of QAing it. But ensuring you take this time will save you a lot of headaches in the long run.

4. Add Automated Checks When You QA

While Scott recommends running QA checks, Derric Haynie, chief ecommerce technologist at Ecommerce Tech, takes it one step further. He suggests using automated checks to protect you from tiny errors that can cost you your ad spend. The best marketers do this to provide the best post-click experience from ad to landing page.

This realization didn’t come to Derric immediately, though. It’s something he learned after running a PPC campaign that drove to a dead 404 page. A small oversight that meant throwing $10K down the drain. (In McDonald’s terms, it’s equal to 40,000 Chicken McNuggets. A whole lotta nugs.)

Luckily, Google Ads includes final URLs to help make sure your ads are leading your prospects to the right landing page. Derric uses this field, especially for dynamic ads.

Nowadays, I’m using Google’s ‘Final URL’ column and either copy/pasting or exporting all the URLs to check the final destination works. They now have a landing page validation checker built in.

The Final URL is the address of the page in your website that people reach when they click your ad. (Source: Google)

Incorporate automated QA checks into your process wherever you can. You’ll minimize human error, and might even have some budget left over for a 10-piece McNugget. 

5. Validate New Ideas With Customer Research

These days, data needs to be the driving force behind any marketing strategy. It’s a must-have for any business’s growth and success. (If Obi-Wan Kenobi were a marketer, I’m sure he’d want you to use the data force.) 

But don’t take my word for it. Here’s Google:

Even Google reports that leading marketers believe how they apply their data is crucial to success. (Source: Think with Google)

Ask any great marketer, and they’ll tell you that they don’t make business decisions without the data to back it. It’s a best practice, but one we can easily forget.

Marc Bitanga, Founder & Managing Director at Discoverable Media, almost committed an epic fail because a key stakeholder of a media company was determined to make a drastic change to their website without the data to support it. 

The stakeholder thought the change would lead to a big win. Marc, on the other hand, felt like it wasn’t a good idea. Working with his UX team, he conducted research to confirm his hunch. He recorded real-life feedback sessions with customers to validate the stakeholder’s requirements.

Turns out Marc’s intuition was right: the proposed changes would have led to a bad experience for website visitors. If anything, Marc is a prime example of why research is the key to making informed decisions. And Marc has learned his lesson:

I avoid similar fails today by conducting as much customer research as possible to improve customer centricity.

Remember to keep your customers at the heart of every marketing idea and decision so that you can determine if an idea is viable or not. It’s frequently the difference between crash-and-burn ideas and successful ones.

6. Test One Change at a Time

Great marketing comes from testing, analyzing, and iterating based on results. (It’s an art and a science.) As marketers, we’re always busy pushing campaigns out the door, but we need to remind ourselves not to get in over our heads. When testing, that means taking a step back and making changes one at a time, versus all at once. 

For instance, Casie Gillette, senior director of digital marketing at KoMarketing, redesigned a big website for a client that involved a ton of changes at once. Everything from updating URLs, switching CMS systems, and updating content. Her mistake?

We hadn’t tested moving a site to HTTPS and changing all of the URLs and content at the same time.

The modifications led to a massive loss in qualified traffic and leads all at once, plus a host of pesky technical issues. Casie knew page content revisions and testing were both necessary to improve relevance and ranking. To increase conversions, her team tested on-page tags, created guides to compete in SERPs, and even optimized their landing pages with CTAs, banners, and forms.

It was basically an all-out blitz to find what was working and how to replicate it across the site … It really came down to consistency, testing, and replication.

There’s no magical one-size-fits-all recipe for success. But you can focus your testing efforts rather than tackling everything at once. That way, you can identify what works and what doesn’t. (It’s a testing best practice.)

Keen to grow your conversion rates? With our landing pages, you can experiment on your messaging, page design, and forms to validate ideas and score more conversions with A/B testing.

7. Set Realistic Goals and Expectations

Goals are the building blocks for any marketer. They provide clarity and guidance for when you start putting together a marketing strategy and action plan. But making sure your goals are well-defined and realistic is often easier said than done, especially if you’re ambitious.

Sphoorti Bhandare, PR and content whisperer—yep, you read that right—prepared for a big store launch one month in advance. Despite her proactive planning, though, things started to fall apart one by one a week before they were set to go live.

With little time and no contingency plan, Sphoorti postponed the launch. While not ideal, it did help her realize where she failed:

We hugely underestimated the effort required to make the launch successful and didn’t really write down a crisis communication plan for worst-case scenarios.

Many things can go wrong on a marketing campaign. When you start a new project, ask yourself: do I have the time, resources, and budget I need to accomplish everything? Then set specific, realistic marketing goals and inform everyone of them. 

The biggest lesson I took from this was to set realistic goals and expectations and consistently monitor them. Not only for the marketing team, but for every department, vendor, and executive involved.

Having a crystal clear vision of what you want to achieve can help hold you and your team accountable within a given time frame. If you aren’t able to reach your goals in the end, that’s OK. The beauty of goal-setting is taking a step back and seeing how or where you can improve next time.

(via Isaac Smith on Unsplash)

8. Create Clear Content Briefs

You’ve got your strategy. You’ve got your buyer personas. Now you’ve got to whip together some content that supports this overall strategy and speaks directly to your buyers. Before you do anything, sitting down to create a clear content brief is one of the smartest time investments you can make. 

(Believe me, you’ll thank yourself later.)

The best marketers would agree that a content brief can paint a clear picture for anyone you work with. Taru Bhargava of Foundation Marketing is one of them. 

When she first started out as a content marketer, Taru commissioned freelance writers to contribute long-form articles. To save time, she only provided them with a topic. Little did she know that this approach would backfire. 

Guess what? The lack of a detailed brief resulted in commissioned articles that suffered in quality. And, even more importantly, it turned into an enormous waste of time and effort. Realizing her blunder, Taru now follows a framework to include everything that’s required for someone to know before they create any content—the voice and tone, target audience, competitors, keywords, internal links, and more. 

Sticking to a content brief and overcommunicating the expectations is always a good strategy when working with freelancers … Providing them with as much info as possible in the first go is the best way to avoid the to & fro of edits.

Creating a content brief as your north star helps everyone understand what you want to accomplish with a piece of content. A brief can take the guesswork out of content creation, saving you time and money. 

Taru’s secret is this content writing brief template from CoSchedule. (She swears by it, so you know it’s good.)

9. Promote Visibility Within Your Team

We live in a fast-paced marketing world. Timelines fluctuate. Campaigns change. Requests from different stakeholders come at any given moment. Communicating these changes to every member of your team can be a significant challenge.

For example, Eric Siu, CEO of Single Grain, made a $500K deal to run a promotional campaign for a SaaS company. The problem? He didn’t tell his team, which left everyone scrambling at the last minute when orders started rolling in. Oops. You can imagine his colleagues weren’t too happy.

Eric admits he failed, but shares what he took away from the experience:

I learned that inter-departmental communication is important. It was a marketing fail, yes. But because so much of marketing is evangelizing your own marketing within the company, I lost respect and trust.

Making others aware of the work you’re doing—especially if that work involves them—is the key. When there’s so many tasks on the go, we need to hear something several times before we process it. Be extra clear and overcommunicate, so no one you’re working with gets caught by surprise. Then keep open lines of communication between you and any team you’re working with.

(via youxventures at Unsplash)

10. Prioritize Projects Based on Potential Impact

Managing a laundry list of priorities is probably nothing new to you. You’ve got top-level business objectives, departmental strategic initiatives, and marketing priorities to think about. But selecting the priorities that will have the greatest impact can be very tricky—especially when you have pressure from stakeholders to pursue certain projects.  

Back in 2018, the Unbounce content team wondered if Call to Action Conference might warrant a digital magazine-style recap. We wanted to write recap material to extend the lifespan of the live event. And we were inspired by Montreal’s G2 conference and the amazing, physical print book their organizers use to commemorate the experience.

Excited, the Unbounce team jumped at the chance to create a ‘zine. But, as Unbounce’s Head of Content Marketing, Jennifer Pepper, says, “there were several other content projects I should have prioritized instead. Despite eagerness and stakeholders hoping to squeeze the most reuse out of our live event, there were more pressing content priorities and I should have a) trusted my gut and b) made a more solid case for working on the projects I knew could have a greater overall payoff for the business.”

Call to Action Magazine was filled with curated insights from the 2017 Call to Action Conference.

Want to experience CTAConf this year and raise your marketing IQ? Check out the conference and workshop agenda for September 2019. Tickets are still available.

Jen now prioritizes far more ruthlessly, having learned to advocate for the right work more vocally. Her ultimate takeaway?

If you own prioritization, it’s up to you to uncover the opportunities and make sure you’re making the strongest case to stakeholders on the right stuff to create. As a content lead, it’s about how you can educate stakeholders so they understand why some things are more worthy of your team’s time than others.

11. Don’t Sell Yourself Short

Whether you’re leading a big marketing team or just part of one, it’s easy to get lost in the shuffle. Different experts have different opinions, and not everybody is right 100% of the time. How do you manage them?

Kasey Bayne, head of marketing at DataTrue, faced a difficult situation early in her career. Someone she was working with wanted to break into a new market by doing a big trade show. With no lead time or reputation in that industry (not to mention a very tight budget) Kasey had significant doubts. She voiced her concerns at first, but, against her better judgment, eventually agreed to the move. 

The trade show turned out to be a flop. Kasey learned a valuable lesson nonetheless. “When you are the expert or marketing leader in your team, it’s important to be strong about your recommendations,” she says.

Prepare your case, bring your data, and your experience to present a solid recommendation as best as you can without being so quick to give in to others.

No matter your age or years of experience in the industry, trust your knowledge as a marketer. Don’t be afraid to stand up for yourself and voice your concerns or suggestions. (As Marc Bitanga would say, it’s even better when you’re able to back up those arguments with data.) 

If at First You Fail, Try Again!

Everybody makes mistakes. Everybody has one of those days.

From these 11 examples, we can see how even experienced, expert marketers can fail. (And fail again.) But, crucially, they transform their mistakes into insights about what not to do in the future. 

So if you happen to make a mistake—and you probably will—think of it as a learning opportunity. No need to wrap yourself in a blanket of shame; own your failures and turn them into your own personal ‘aha!’ moment. 

Go on—take chances, make mistakes, and get messy.

You’ll be in great company. 

Have marketing fails you’d like to share? Leave them in the comments below, and let us know what you learned.

from Digital https://unbounce.com/campaign-strategy/marketing-fails-and-lessons-learned/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[josephkchoi]

11 Marketing Experts Share Their Marketing Fails (and Lessons Learned)

If you’ve ever failed in marketing, you’re not alone.

Nobody likes to mess up, but we’ve all been there. And what sets truly remarkable marketers apart from everyone else isn’t that they don’t ever make mistakes. They do. It’s just that they learn from their failures. 

As Barack Obama put it, “You can’t let your failures define you. You have to let your failures teach you.” (Thanks, Obama. No, really. Thank you.) 

With that in mind, we asked 11 experienced marketers to share what they’ve learned from their past blunders. These pros are living proof that we can learn as much from those times things didn’t go our way as we can from our biggest wins. As you’ll see, getting it wrong helped them grow their business, develop a customer-focused philosophy, improve their abilities as a leader, and much more.

So let’s dive right in.

Jump Straight to a Lesson Learned from a Marketing Fail

Target the Right Keywords

Develop Buyer Personas to Inform Your Marketing

Put QA Checks in Place

Add Automated Checks When You QA

Validate New Ideas with Customer Research

Test One Change At a Time

Set Realistic Goals and Expectations

Create Clear Content Briefs

Promote Visibility Within Your Team

Prioritize Projects Based on Potential Impact

Don’t Sell Yourself Short

1. Target the Right Keywords

Every marketer knows the value of organic keywords. Understanding what your target audience is searching for (and how you can rank for specific keywords) can help you optimize your campaigns and develop an effective SEO strategy. 

But what if a piece of content doesn’t rank at all? What if it ends up ten pages deep in the SERPs? What if it forever sinks to the deep Mariana Trench of Google?

Take Andy Crestodina, co-founder of Orbit Media Studios. He spent over 20 hours on a 4,100+ word article (and a 12-minute video) only to have it fail as a piece of organic content. He figured he’d optimize it for a popular phrase, get it to rank, and win a steady stream of traffic. But that never happened. 

Andy owns up to why he failed:

I didn’t dig in deep enough while checking competition. As it turns out, the high ranking pages have huge numbers of inbound links. Even though the difficulty score was low, the linking root domain numbers were off the charts. But I never checked.

Andy learned a powerful lesson: your content won’t rank by magic.

You need to put hard work into targeting the right phrases that can compound traffic over time. To avoid losing your content in Google search obscurity, take the time to research the keywords you want to target first. 

Hit the sweet spot for keywords by researching phrases that have a good mix of search volume, general intent, and popularity among competitors. (Source: Orbit Media)

And don’t just look at search volume. Make sure you check out how your competitors rank to ensure you’re ready to take them on. You want to know if you’re going up against the Mohammed Ali of content before you throw your hat into the ring.

2. Develop Buyer Personas to Inform Your Marketing

Buyer personas go hand-in-hand with your marketing strategy. They’re the needle to your strategy’s thread. The arrow to your bow. The Kim to your Kanye. (You see where I’m going with this.) 

Defining the ideal customer audience you want to attract will help you market to them in the best way possible. However, to build robust, accurate buyer personas, you need one thing: data. 

Early on in his career, Brandon Gains, VP of marketing at MonetizeMore, created personas from gut-feeling alone. He didn’t validate them through qualitative research, surveys, and interviews. And without a formal process to gather internal and external data points, he failed to involve a large customer base in his company’s marketing and product direction. 

But to get internal buy-in from department heads, he needed more than his gut feeling. He needed to fix how his company crafted buyer personas:

We reignited our user research process and developed more of a scientific approach that incorporates internal and external research into concrete deliverables that I use across the company.

Like Brandon says, you need to ground your buyer personas in research and data—a.k.a. the real world (and, no, not the MTV version). Even though it’s nitty-gritty work, setting up customer interviews and internal discussions across your sales, customer success, product, and marketing teams will pay off in the long run. You’ll be able to better determine your objectives and anticipate consumer needs. 

With buyer personas, you can know how to tailor your content to segmented audiences who have different preferences, challenges, and pain points.  (Source: Unbounce)

Like any dynamic duo, buyer personas can also help you create segmented landing pages that speak to different types of visitors. You can use different templates to quickly build customized pages that’ll give them exactly what they’re looking for.

3. Put QA Checks in Place

Quality assurance is one step you should never skip, but it’s also the one you’ll be most tempted to skip. Don’t do it. Resist the urge. QA is key for ensuring a high-performing campaign.

Put yourself in your visitors’ shoes: how would you feel if you clicked on a link that went to a nonexistent page? Frustrated or annoyed? Definitely. Content with typos and broken links can create a bad first impression.

It’s what happened to Scott McLeod, chief of staff at Resident. He learned the hard way about the importance of QAing after running ads to a landing page that didn’t load. (It’s a big no-no considering you need to ensure your site loads as quickly as possible.)

His advice? Be extra mindful to check that you inspect every aspect of your campaign. Or, to put it another (bigger, bolder) way:

You need to provide a seamless user experience for your customers that will make ’em love you. Treat it like a first date: you want to please your prospects from the get-go so they’ll have more reason to want to keep dating you. (And maybe even marry you.) 

We specifically have the team follow from ad to checkout, especially for major sales or mass communications … Creating redundancy in the QA process or review process leads to less mishaps.

When you have ten other things to do, it can be tempting to call something done without going through the crucial last step of QAing it. But ensuring you take this time will save you a lot of headaches in the long run.

4. Add Automated Checks When You QA

While Scott recommends running QA checks, Derric Haynie, chief ecommerce technologist at Ecommerce Tech, takes it one step further. He suggests using automated checks to protect you from tiny errors that can cost you your ad spend. The best marketers do this to provide the best post-click experience from ad to landing page.

This realization didn’t come to Derric immediately, though. It’s something he learned after running a PPC campaign that drove to a dead 404 page. A small oversight that meant throwing $10K down the drain. (In McDonald’s terms, it’s equal to 40,000 Chicken McNuggets. A whole lotta nugs.)

Luckily, Google Ads includes final URLs to help make sure your ads are leading your prospects to the right landing page. Derric uses this field, especially for dynamic ads.

Nowadays, I’m using Google’s ‘Final URL’ column and either copy/pasting or exporting all the URLs to check the final destination works. They now have a landing page validation checker built in.

The Final URL is the address of the page in your website that people reach when they click your ad. (Source: Google)

Incorporate automated QA checks into your process wherever you can. You’ll minimize human error, and might even have some budget left over for a 10-piece McNugget. 

5. Validate New Ideas With Customer Research

These days, data needs to be the driving force behind any marketing strategy. It’s a must-have for any business’s growth and success. (If Obi-Wan Kenobi were a marketer, I’m sure he’d want you to use the data force.) 

But don’t take my word for it. Here’s Google:

Even Google reports that leading marketers believe how they apply their data is crucial to success. (Source: Think with Google)

Ask any great marketer, and they’ll tell you that they don’t make business decisions without the data to back it. It’s a best practice, but one we can easily forget.

Marc Bitanga, Founder & Managing Director at Discoverable Media, almost committed an epic fail because a key stakeholder of a media company was determined to make a drastic change to their website without the data to support it. 

The stakeholder thought the change would lead to a big win. Marc, on the other hand, felt like it wasn’t a good idea. Working with his UX team, he conducted research to confirm his hunch. He recorded real-life feedback sessions with customers to validate the stakeholder’s requirements.

Turns out Marc’s intuition was right: the proposed changes would have led to a bad experience for website visitors. If anything, Marc is a prime example of why research is the key to making informed decisions. And Marc has learned his lesson:

I avoid similar fails today by conducting as much customer research as possible to improve customer centricity.

Remember to keep your customers at the heart of every marketing idea and decision so that you can determine if an idea is viable or not. It’s frequently the difference between crash-and-burn ideas and successful ones.

6. Test One Change at a Time

Great marketing comes from testing, analyzing, and iterating based on results. (It’s an art and a science.) As marketers, we’re always busy pushing campaigns out the door, but we need to remind ourselves not to get in over our heads. When testing, that means taking a step back and making changes one at a time, versus all at once. 

For instance, Casie Gillette, senior director of digital marketing at KoMarketing, redesigned a big website for a client that involved a ton of changes at once. Everything from updating URLs, switching CMS systems, and updating content. Her mistake?

We hadn’t tested moving a site to HTTPS and changing all of the URLs and content at the same time.

The modifications led to a massive loss in qualified traffic and leads all at once, plus a host of pesky technical issues. Casie knew page content revisions and testing were both necessary to improve relevance and ranking. To increase conversions, her team tested on-page tags, created guides to compete in SERPs, and even optimized their landing pages with CTAs, banners, and forms.

It was basically an all-out blitz to find what was working and how to replicate it across the site … It really came down to consistency, testing, and replication.

There’s no magical one-size-fits-all recipe for success. But you can focus your testing efforts rather than tackling everything at once. That way, you can identify what works and what doesn’t. (It’s a testing best practice.)

Keen to grow your conversion rates? With our landing pages, you can experiment on your messaging, page design, and forms to validate ideas and score more conversions with A/B testing.

7. Set Realistic Goals and Expectations

Goals are the building blocks for any marketer. They provide clarity and guidance for when you start putting together a marketing strategy and action plan. But making sure your goals are well-defined and realistic is often easier said than done, especially if you’re ambitious.

Sphoorti Bhandare, PR and content whisperer—yep, you read that right—prepared for a big store launch one month in advance. Despite her proactive planning, though, things started to fall apart one by one a week before they were set to go live.

With little time and no contingency plan, Sphoorti postponed the launch. While not ideal, it did help her realize where she failed:

We hugely underestimated the effort required to make the launch successful and didn’t really write down a crisis communication plan for worst-case scenarios.

Many things can go wrong on a marketing campaign. When you start a new project, ask yourself: do I have the time, resources, and budget I need to accomplish everything? Then set specific, realistic marketing goals and inform everyone of them. 

The biggest lesson I took from this was to set realistic goals and expectations and consistently monitor them. Not only for the marketing team, but for every department, vendor, and executive involved.

Having a crystal clear vision of what you want to achieve can help hold you and your team accountable within a given time frame. If you aren’t able to reach your goals in the end, that’s OK. The beauty of goal-setting is taking a step back and seeing how or where you can improve next time.

(via Isaac Smith on Unsplash)

8. Create Clear Content Briefs

You’ve got your strategy. You’ve got your buyer personas. Now you’ve got to whip together some content that supports this overall strategy and speaks directly to your buyers. Before you do anything, sitting down to create a clear content brief is one of the smartest time investments you can make. 

(Believe me, you’ll thank yourself later.)

The best marketers would agree that a content brief can paint a clear picture for anyone you work with. Taru Bhargava of Foundation Marketing is one of them. 

When she first started out as a content marketer, Taru commissioned freelance writers to contribute long-form articles. To save time, she only provided them with a topic. Little did she know that this approach would backfire. 

Guess what? The lack of a detailed brief resulted in commissioned articles that suffered in quality. And, even more importantly, it turned into an enormous waste of time and effort. Realizing her blunder, Taru now follows a framework to include everything that’s required for someone to know before they create any content—the voice and tone, target audience, competitors, keywords, internal links, and more. 

Sticking to a content brief and overcommunicating the expectations is always a good strategy when working with freelancers … Providing them with as much info as possible in the first go is the best way to avoid the to & fro of edits.

Creating a content brief as your north star helps everyone understand what you want to accomplish with a piece of content. A brief can take the guesswork out of content creation, saving you time and money. 

Taru’s secret is this content writing brief template from CoSchedule. (She swears by it, so you know it’s good.)

9. Promote Visibility Within Your Team

We live in a fast-paced marketing world. Timelines fluctuate. Campaigns change. Requests from different stakeholders come at any given moment. Communicating these changes to every member of your team can be a significant challenge.

For example, Eric Siu, CEO of Single Grain, made a $500K deal to run a promotional campaign for a SaaS company. The problem? He didn’t tell his team, which left everyone scrambling at the last minute when orders started rolling in. Oops. You can imagine his colleagues weren’t too happy.

Eric admits he failed, but shares what he took away from the experience:

I learned that inter-departmental communication is important. It was a marketing fail, yes. But because so much of marketing is evangelizing your own marketing within the company, I lost respect and trust.

Making others aware of the work you’re doing—especially if that work involves them—is the key. When there’s so many tasks on the go, we need to hear something several times before we process it. Be extra clear and overcommunicate, so no one you’re working with gets caught by surprise. Then keep open lines of communication between you and any team you’re working with.

(via youxventures at Unsplash)

10. Prioritize Projects Based on Potential Impact

Managing a laundry list of priorities is probably nothing new to you. You’ve got top-level business objectives, departmental strategic initiatives, and marketing priorities to think about. But selecting the priorities that will have the greatest impact can be very tricky—especially when you have pressure from stakeholders to pursue certain projects.  

Back in 2018, the Unbounce content team wondered if Call to Action Conference might warrant a digital magazine-style recap. We wanted to write recap material to extend the lifespan of the live event. And we were inspired by Montreal’s G2 conference and the amazing, physical print book their organizers use to commemorate the experience.

Excited, the Unbounce team jumped at the chance to create a ‘zine. But, as Unbounce’s Head of Content Marketing, Jennifer Pepper, says, “there were several other content projects I should have prioritized instead. Despite eagerness and stakeholders hoping to squeeze the most reuse out of our live event, there were more pressing content priorities and I should have a) trusted my gut and b) made a more solid case for working on the projects I knew could have a greater overall payoff for the business.”

Call to Action Magazine was filled with curated insights from the 2017 Call to Action Conference.

Want to experience CTAConf this year and raise your marketing IQ? Check out the conference and workshop agenda for September 2019. Tickets are still available.

Jen now prioritizes far more ruthlessly, having learned to advocate for the right work more vocally. Her ultimate takeaway?

If you own prioritization, it’s up to you to uncover the opportunities and make sure you’re making the strongest case to stakeholders on the right stuff to create. As a content lead, it’s about how you can educate stakeholders so they understand why some things are more worthy of your team’s time than others.

11. Don’t Sell Yourself Short

Whether you’re leading a big marketing team or just part of one, it’s easy to get lost in the shuffle. Different experts have different opinions, and not everybody is right 100% of the time. How do you manage them?

Kasey Bayne, head of marketing at DataTrue, faced a difficult situation early in her career. Someone she was working with wanted to break into a new market by doing a big trade show. With no lead time or reputation in that industry (not to mention a very tight budget) Kasey had significant doubts. She voiced her concerns at first, but, against her better judgment, eventually agreed to the move. 

The trade show turned out to be a flop. Kasey learned a valuable lesson nonetheless. “When you are the expert or marketing leader in your team, it’s important to be strong about your recommendations,” she says.

Prepare your case, bring your data, and your experience to present a solid recommendation as best as you can without being so quick to give in to others.

No matter your age or years of experience in the industry, trust your knowledge as a marketer. Don’t be afraid to stand up for yourself and voice your concerns or suggestions. (As Marc Bitanga would say, it’s even better when you’re able to back up those arguments with data.) 

If at First You Fail, Try Again!

Everybody makes mistakes. Everybody has one of those days.

From these 11 examples, we can see how even experienced, expert marketers can fail. (And fail again.) But, crucially, they transform their mistakes into insights about what not to do in the future. 

So if you happen to make a mistake—and you probably will—think of it as a learning opportunity. No need to wrap yourself in a blanket of shame; own your failures and turn them into your own personal ‘aha!’ moment. 

Go on—take chances, make mistakes, and get messy.

You’ll be in great company. 

Have marketing fails you’d like to share? Leave them in the comments below, and let us know what you learned.

11 Marketing Experts Share Their Marketing Fails (and Lessons Learned) published first on https://nickpontemrktg.wordpress.com/

[annaxkeating]

11 Marketing Experts Share Their Marketing Fails (and Lessons Learned)

If you’ve ever failed in marketing, you’re not alone.

Nobody likes to mess up, but we’ve all been there. And what sets truly remarkable marketers apart from everyone else isn’t that they don’t ever make mistakes. They do. It’s just that they learn from their failures. 

As Barack Obama put it, “You can’t let your failures define you. You have to let your failures teach you.” (Thanks, Obama. No, really. Thank you.) 

With that in mind, we asked 11 experienced marketers to share what they’ve learned from their past blunders. These pros are living proof that we can learn as much from those times things didn’t go our way as we can from our biggest wins. As you’ll see, getting it wrong helped them grow their business, develop a customer-focused philosophy, improve their abilities as a leader, and much more.

So let’s dive right in.

Jump Straight to a Lesson Learned from a Marketing Fail

Target the Right Keywords

Develop Buyer Personas to Inform Your Marketing

Put QA Checks in Place

Add Automated Checks When You QA

Validate New Ideas with Customer Research

Test One Change At a Time

Set Realistic Goals and Expectations

Create Clear Content Briefs

Promote Visibility Within Your Team

Prioritize Projects Based on Potential Impact

Don’t Sell Yourself Short

1. Target the Right Keywords

Every marketer knows the value of organic keywords. Understanding what your target audience is searching for (and how you can rank for specific keywords) can help you optimize your campaigns and develop an effective SEO strategy. 

But what if a piece of content doesn’t rank at all? What if it ends up ten pages deep in the SERPs? What if it forever sinks to the deep Mariana Trench of Google?

Take Andy Crestodina, co-founder of Orbit Media Studios. He spent over 20 hours on a 4,100+ word article (and a 12-minute video) only to have it fail as a piece of organic content. He figured he’d optimize it for a popular phrase, get it to rank, and win a steady stream of traffic. But that never happened. 

Andy owns up to why he failed:

I didn’t dig in deep enough while checking competition. As it turns out, the high ranking pages have huge numbers of inbound links. Even though the difficulty score was low, the linking root domain numbers were off the charts. But I never checked.

Andy learned a powerful lesson: your content won’t rank by magic.

You need to put hard work into targeting the right phrases that can compound traffic over time. To avoid losing your content in Google search obscurity, take the time to research the keywords you want to target first. 

Hit the sweet spot for keywords by researching phrases that have a good mix of search volume, general intent, and popularity among competitors. (Source: Orbit Media)

And don’t just look at search volume. Make sure you check out how your competitors rank to ensure you’re ready to take them on. You want to know if you’re going up against the Mohammed Ali of content before you throw your hat into the ring.

2. Develop Buyer Personas to Inform Your Marketing

Buyer personas go hand-in-hand with your marketing strategy. They’re the needle to your strategy’s thread. The arrow to your bow. The Kim to your Kanye. (You see where I’m going with this.) 

Defining the ideal customer audience you want to attract will help you market to them in the best way possible. However, to build robust, accurate buyer personas, you need one thing: data. 

Early on in his career, Brandon Gains, VP of marketing at MonetizeMore, created personas from gut-feeling alone. He didn’t validate them through qualitative research, surveys, and interviews. And without a formal process to gather internal and external data points, he failed to involve a large customer base in his company’s marketing and product direction. 

But to get internal buy-in from department heads, he needed more than his gut feeling. He needed to fix how his company crafted buyer personas:

We reignited our user research process and developed more of a scientific approach that incorporates internal and external research into concrete deliverables that I use across the company.

Like Brandon says, you need to ground your buyer personas in research and data—a.k.a. the real world (and, no, not the MTV version). Even though it’s nitty-gritty work, setting up customer interviews and internal discussions across your sales, customer success, product, and marketing teams will pay off in the long run. You’ll be able to better determine your objectives and anticipate consumer needs. 

With buyer personas, you can know how to tailor your content to segmented audiences who have different preferences, challenges, and pain points.  (Source: Unbounce)

Like any dynamic duo, buyer personas can also help you create segmented landing pages that speak to different types of visitors. You can use different templates to quickly build customized pages that’ll give them exactly what they’re looking for.

3. Put QA Checks in Place

Quality assurance is one step you should never skip, but it’s also the one you’ll be most tempted to skip. Don’t do it. Resist the urge. QA is key for ensuring a high-performing campaign.

Put yourself in your visitors’ shoes: how would you feel if you clicked on a link that went to a nonexistent page? Frustrated or annoyed? Definitely. Content with typos and broken links can create a bad first impression.

It’s what happened to Scott McLeod, chief of staff at Resident. He learned the hard way about the importance of QAing after running ads to a landing page that didn’t load. (It’s a big no-no considering you need to ensure your site loads as quickly as possible.)

His advice? Be extra mindful to check that you inspect every aspect of your campaign. Or, to put it another (bigger, bolder) way:

You need to provide a seamless user experience for your customers that will make ’em love you. Treat it like a first date: you want to please your prospects from the get-go so they’ll have more reason to want to keep dating you. (And maybe even marry you.) 

We specifically have the team follow from ad to checkout, especially for major sales or mass communications … Creating redundancy in the QA process or review process leads to less mishaps.

When you have ten other things to do, it can be tempting to call something done without going through the crucial last step of QAing it. But ensuring you take this time will save you a lot of headaches in the long run.

4. Add Automated Checks When You QA

While Scott recommends running QA checks, Derric Haynie, chief ecommerce technologist at Ecommerce Tech, takes it one step further. He suggests using automated checks to protect you from tiny errors that can cost you your ad spend. The best marketers do this to provide the best post-click experience from ad to landing page.

This realization didn’t come to Derric immediately, though. It’s something he learned after running a PPC campaign that drove to a dead 404 page. A small oversight that meant throwing $10K down the drain. (In McDonald’s terms, it’s equal to 40,000 Chicken McNuggets. A whole lotta nugs.)

Luckily, Google Ads includes final URLs to help make sure your ads are leading your prospects to the right landing page. Derric uses this field, especially for dynamic ads.

Nowadays, I’m using Google’s ‘Final URL’ column and either copy/pasting or exporting all the URLs to check the final destination works. They now have a landing page validation checker built in.

The Final URL is the address of the page in your website that people reach when they click your ad. (Source: Google)

Incorporate automated QA checks into your process wherever you can. You’ll minimize human error, and might even have some budget left over for a 10-piece McNugget. 

5. Validate New Ideas With Customer Research

These days, data needs to be the driving force behind any marketing strategy. It’s a must-have for any business’s growth and success. (If Obi-Wan Kenobi were a marketer, I’m sure he’d want you to use the data force.) 

But don’t take my word for it. Here’s Google:

Even Google reports that leading marketers believe how they apply their data is crucial to success. (Source: Think with Google)

Ask any great marketer, and they’ll tell you that they don’t make business decisions without the data to back it. It’s a best practice, but one we can easily forget.

Marc Bitanga, CEO at Agencio, almost committed an epic fail because a key stakeholder of a media company was determined to make a drastic change to their website without the data to support it. 

The stakeholder thought the change would lead to a big win. Marc, on the other hand, felt like it wasn’t a good idea. Working with his UX team, he conducted research to confirm his hunch. He recorded real-life feedback sessions with customers to validate the stakeholder’s requirements.

Turns out Marc’s intuition was right: the proposed changes would have led to a bad experience for website visitors. If anything, Marc is a prime example of why research is the key to making informed decisions. And Marc has learned his lesson:

I avoid similar fails today by conducting as much customer research as possible to improve customer centricity.

Remember to keep your customers at the heart of every marketing idea and decision so that you can determine if an idea is viable or not. It’s frequently the difference between crash-and-burn ideas and successful ones.

6. Test One Change at a Time

Great marketing comes from testing, analyzing, and iterating based on results. (It’s an art and a science.) As marketers, we’re always busy pushing campaigns out the door, but we need to remind ourselves not to get in over our heads. When testing, that means taking a step back and making changes one at a time, versus all at once. 

For instance, Casie Gillette, senior director of digital marketing at KoMarketing, redesigned a big website for a client that involved a ton of changes at once. Everything from updating URLs, switching CMS systems, and updating content. Her mistake?

We hadn’t tested moving a site to HTTPS and changing all of the URLs and content at the same time.

The modifications led to a massive loss in qualified traffic and leads all at once, plus a host of pesky technical issues. Casie knew page content revisions and testing were both necessary to improve relevance and ranking. To increase conversions, her team tested on-page tags, created guides to compete in SERPs, and even optimized their landing pages with CTAs, banners, and forms.

It was basically an all-out blitz to find what was working and how to replicate it across the site … It really came down to consistency, testing, and replication.

There’s no magical one-size-fits-all recipe for success. But you can focus your testing efforts rather than tackling everything at once. That way, you can identify what works and what doesn’t. (It’s a testing best practice.)

Keen to grow your conversion rates? With our landing pages, you can experiment on your messaging, page design, and forms to validate ideas and score more conversions with A/B testing.

7. Set Realistic Goals and Expectations

Goals are the building blocks for any marketer. They provide clarity and guidance for when you start putting together a marketing strategy and action plan. But making sure your goals are well-defined and realistic is often easier said than done, especially if you’re ambitious.

Sphoorti Bhandare, PR and content whisperer—yep, you read that right—prepared for a big store launch one month in advance. Despite her proactive planning, though, things started to fall apart one by one a week before they were set to go live.

With little time and no contingency plan, Sphoorti postponed the launch. While not ideal, it did help her realize where she failed:

We hugely underestimated the effort required to make the launch successful and didn’t really write down a crisis communication plan for worst-case scenarios.

Many things can go wrong on a marketing campaign. When you start a new project, ask yourself: do I have the time, resources, and budget I need to accomplish everything? Then set specific, realistic marketing goals and inform everyone of them. 

The biggest lesson I took from this was to set realistic goals and expectations and consistently monitor them. Not only for the marketing team, but for every department, vendor, and executive involved.

Having a crystal clear vision of what you want to achieve can help hold you and your team accountable within a given time frame. If you aren’t able to reach your goals in the end, that’s OK. The beauty of goal-setting is taking a step back and seeing how or where you can improve next time.

(via Isaac Smith on Unsplash)

8. Create Clear Content Briefs

You’ve got your strategy. You’ve got your buyer personas. Now you’ve got to whip together some content that supports this overall strategy and speaks directly to your buyers. Before you do anything, sitting down to create a clear content brief is one of the smartest time investments you can make. 

(Believe me, you’ll thank yourself later.)

The best marketers would agree that a content brief can paint a clear picture for anyone you work with. Taru Bhargava of Foundation Marketing is one of them. 

When she first started out as a content marketer, Taru commissioned freelance writers to contribute long-form articles. To save time, she only provided them with a topic. Little did she know that this approach would backfire. 

Guess what? The lack of a detailed brief resulted in commissioned articles that suffered in quality. And, even more importantly, it turned into an enormous waste of time and effort. Realizing her blunder, Taru now follows a framework to include everything that’s required for someone to know before they create any content—the voice and tone, target audience, competitors, keywords, internal links, and more. 

Sticking to a content brief and overcommunicating the expectations is always a good strategy when working with freelancers … Providing them with as much info as possible in the first go is the best way to avoid the to & fro of edits.

Creating a content brief as your north star helps everyone understand what you want to accomplish with a piece of content. A brief can take the guesswork out of content creation, saving you time and money. 

Taru’s secret is this content writing brief template from CoSchedule. (She swears by it, so you know it’s good.)

9. Promote Visibility Within Your Team

We live in a fast-paced marketing world. Timelines fluctuate. Campaigns change. Requests from different stakeholders come at any given moment. Communicating these changes to every member of your team can be a significant challenge.

For example, Eric Siu, CEO of Single Grain, made a $500K deal to run a promotional campaign for a SaaS company. The problem? He didn’t tell his team, which left everyone scrambling at the last minute when orders started rolling in. Oops. You can imagine his colleagues weren’t too happy.

Eric admits he failed, but shares what he took away from the experience:

I learned that inter-departmental communication is important. It was a marketing fail, yes. But because so much of marketing is evangelizing your own marketing within the company, I lost respect and trust.

Making others aware of the work you’re doing—especially if that work involves them—is the key. When there’s so many tasks on the go, we need to hear something several times before we process it. Be extra clear and overcommunicate, so no one you’re working with gets caught by surprise. Then keep open lines of communication between you and any team you’re working with.

(via youxventures at Unsplash)

10. Prioritize Projects Based on Potential Impact

Managing a laundry list of priorities is probably nothing new to you. You’ve got top-level business objectives, departmental strategic initiatives, and marketing priorities to think about. But selecting the priorities that will have the greatest impact can be very tricky—especially when you have pressure from stakeholders to pursue certain projects.  

Back in 2018, the Unbounce content team wondered if Call to Action Conference might warrant a digital magazine-style recap. We wanted to write recap material to extend the lifespan of the live event. And we were inspired by Montreal’s G2 conference and the amazing, physical print book their organizers use to commemorate the experience.

Excited, the Unbounce team jumped at the chance to create a ‘zine. But, as Unbounce’s Head of Content Marketing, Jennifer Pepper, says, “there were several other content projects I should have prioritized instead. Despite eagerness and stakeholders hoping to squeeze the most reuse out of our live event, there were more pressing content priorities and I should have a) trusted my gut and b) made a more solid case for working on the projects I knew could have a greater overall payoff for the business.”

Call to Action Magazine was filled with curated insights from the 2017 Call to Action Conference.

Want to experience CTAConf this year and raise your marketing IQ? Check out the conference and workshop agenda for September 2019. Tickets are still available.

Jen now prioritizes far more ruthlessly, having learned to advocate for the right work more vocally. Her ultimate takeaway?

If you own prioritization, it’s up to you to uncover the opportunities and make sure you’re making the strongest case to stakeholders on the right stuff to create. As a content lead, it’s about how you can educate stakeholders so they understand why some things are more worthy of your team’s time than others.

11. Don’t Sell Yourself Short

Whether you’re leading a big marketing team or just part of one, it’s easy to get lost in the shuffle. Different experts have different opinions, and not everybody is right 100% of the time. How do you manage them?

Kasey Bayne, head of marketing at DataTrue, faced a difficult situation early in her career. Someone she was working with wanted to break into a new market by doing a big trade show. With no lead time or reputation in that industry (not to mention a very tight budget) Kasey had significant doubts. She voiced her concerns at first, but, against her better judgment, eventually agreed to the move. 

The trade show turned out to be a flop. Kasey learned a valuable lesson nonetheless. “When you are the expert or marketing leader in your team, it’s important to be strong about your recommendations,” she says.

Prepare your case, bring your data, and your experience to present a solid recommendation as best as you can without being so quick to give in to others.

No matter your age or years of experience in the industry, trust your knowledge as a marketer. Don’t be afraid to stand up for yourself and voice your concerns or suggestions. (As Marc Bitanga would say, it’s even better when you’re able to back up those arguments with data.) 

If at First You Fail, Try Again!

Everybody makes mistakes. Everybody has one of those days.

From these 11 examples, we can see how even experienced, expert marketers can fail. (And fail again.) But, crucially, they transform their mistakes into insights about what not to do in the future. 

So if you happen to make a mistake—and you probably will—think of it as a learning opportunity. No need to wrap yourself in a blanket of shame; own your failures and turn them into your own personal ‘aha!’ moment. 

Go on—take chances, make mistakes, and get messy.

You’ll be in great company. 

Have marketing fails you’d like to share? Leave them in the comments below, and let us know what you learned.

from Digital https://unbounce.com/campaign-strategy/marketing-fails-and-lessons-learned/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[josephkchoi]

11 Marketing Experts Share Their Marketing Fails (and Lessons Learned)

If you’ve ever failed in marketing, you’re not alone.

Nobody likes to mess up, but we’ve all been there. And what sets truly remarkable marketers apart from everyone else isn’t that they don’t ever make mistakes. They do. It’s just that they learn from their failures. 

As Barack Obama put it, “You can’t let your failures define you. You have to let your failures teach you.” (Thanks, Obama. No, really. Thank you.) 

With that in mind, we asked 11 experienced marketers to share what they’ve learned from their past blunders. These pros are living proof that we can learn as much from those times things didn’t go our way as we can from our biggest wins. As you’ll see, getting it wrong helped them grow their business, develop a customer-focused philosophy, improve their abilities as a leader, and much more.

So let’s dive right in.

Jump Straight to a Lesson Learned from a Marketing Fail

Target the Right Keywords

Develop Buyer Personas to Inform Your Marketing

Put QA Checks in Place

Add Automated Checks When You QA

Validate New Ideas with Customer Research

Test One Change At a Time

Set Realistic Goals and Expectations

Create Clear Content Briefs

Promote Visibility Within Your Team

Prioritize Projects Based on Potential Impact

Don’t Sell Yourself Short

1. Target the Right Keywords

Every marketer knows the value of organic keywords. Understanding what your target audience is searching for (and how you can rank for specific keywords) can help you optimize your campaigns and develop an effective SEO strategy. 

But what if a piece of content doesn’t rank at all? What if it ends up ten pages deep in the SERPs? What if it forever sinks to the deep Mariana Trench of Google?

Take Andy Crestodina, co-founder of Orbit Media Studios. He spent over 20 hours on a 4,100+ word article (and a 12-minute video) only to have it fail as a piece of organic content. He figured he’d optimize it for a popular phrase, get it to rank, and win a steady stream of traffic. But that never happened. 

Andy owns up to why he failed:

I didn’t dig in deep enough while checking competition. As it turns out, the high ranking pages have huge numbers of inbound links. Even though the difficulty score was low, the linking root domain numbers were off the charts. But I never checked.

Andy learned a powerful lesson: your content won’t rank by magic.

You need to put hard work into targeting the right phrases that can compound traffic over time. To avoid losing your content in Google search obscurity, take the time to research the keywords you want to target first. 

Hit the sweet spot for keywords by researching phrases that have a good mix of search volume, general intent, and popularity among competitors. (Source: Orbit Media)

And don’t just look at search volume. Make sure you check out how your competitors rank to ensure you’re ready to take them on. You want to know if you’re going up against the Mohammed Ali of content before you throw your hat into the ring.

2. Develop Buyer Personas to Inform Your Marketing

Buyer personas go hand-in-hand with your marketing strategy. They’re the needle to your strategy’s thread. The arrow to your bow. The Kim to your Kanye. (You see where I’m going with this.) 

Defining the ideal customer audience you want to attract will help you market to them in the best way possible. However, to build robust, accurate buyer personas, you need one thing: data. 

Early on in his career, Brandon Gains, VP of marketing at MonetizeMore, created personas from gut-feeling alone. He didn’t validate them through qualitative research, surveys, and interviews. And without a formal process to gather internal and external data points, he failed to involve a large customer base in his company’s marketing and product direction. 

But to get internal buy-in from department heads, he needed more than his gut feeling. He needed to fix how his company crafted buyer personas:

We reignited our user research process and developed more of a scientific approach that incorporates internal and external research into concrete deliverables that I use across the company.

Like Brandon says, you need to ground your buyer personas in research and data—a.k.a. the real world (and, no, not the MTV version). Even though it’s nitty-gritty work, setting up customer interviews and internal discussions across your sales, customer success, product, and marketing teams will pay off in the long run. You’ll be able to better determine your objectives and anticipate consumer needs. 

With buyer personas, you can know how to tailor your content to segmented audiences who have different preferences, challenges, and pain points.  (Source: Unbounce)

Like any dynamic duo, buyer personas can also help you create segmented landing pages that speak to different types of visitors. You can use different templates to quickly build customized pages that’ll give them exactly what they’re looking for.

3. Put QA Checks in Place

Quality assurance is one step you should never skip, but it’s also the one you’ll be most tempted to skip. Don’t do it. Resist the urge. QA is key for ensuring a high-performing campaign.

Put yourself in your visitors’ shoes: how would you feel if you clicked on a link that went to a nonexistent page? Frustrated or annoyed? Definitely. Content with typos and broken links can create a bad first impression.

It’s what happened to Scott McLeod, chief of staff at Resident. He learned the hard way about the importance of QAing after running ads to a landing page that didn’t load. (It’s a big no-no considering you need to ensure your site loads as quickly as possible.)

His advice? Be extra mindful to check that you inspect every aspect of your campaign. Or, to put it another (bigger, bolder) way:

You need to provide a seamless user experience for your customers that will make ’em love you. Treat it like a first date: you want to please your prospects from the get-go so they’ll have more reason to want to keep dating you. (And maybe even marry you.) 

We specifically have the team follow from ad to checkout, especially for major sales or mass communications … Creating redundancy in the QA process or review process leads to less mishaps.

When you have ten other things to do, it can be tempting to call something done without going through the crucial last step of QAing it. But ensuring you take this time will save you a lot of headaches in the long run.

4. Add Automated Checks When You QA

While Scott recommends running QA checks, Derric Haynie, chief ecommerce technologist at Ecommerce Tech, takes it one step further. He suggests using automated checks to protect you from tiny errors that can cost you your ad spend. The best marketers do this to provide the best post-click experience from ad to landing page.

This realization didn’t come to Derric immediately, though. It’s something he learned after running a PPC campaign that drove to a dead 404 page. A small oversight that meant throwing $10K down the drain. (In McDonald’s terms, it’s equal to 40,000 Chicken McNuggets. A whole lotta nugs.)

Luckily, Google Ads includes final URLs to help make sure your ads are leading your prospects to the right landing page. Derric uses this field, especially for dynamic ads.

Nowadays, I’m using Google’s ‘Final URL’ column and either copy/pasting or exporting all the URLs to check the final destination works. They now have a landing page validation checker built in.

The Final URL is the address of the page in your website that people reach when they click your ad. (Source: Google)

Incorporate automated QA checks into your process wherever you can. You’ll minimize human error, and might even have some budget left over for a 10-piece McNugget. 

5. Validate New Ideas With Customer Research

These days, data needs to be the driving force behind any marketing strategy. It’s a must-have for any business’s growth and success. (If Obi-Wan Kenobi were a marketer, I’m sure he’d want you to use the data force.) 

But don’t take my word for it. Here’s Google:

Even Google reports that leading marketers believe how they apply their data is crucial to success. (Source: Think with Google)

Ask any great marketer, and they’ll tell you that they don’t make business decisions without the data to back it. It’s a best practice, but one we can easily forget.

Marc Bitanga, CEO at Agencio, almost committed an epic fail because a key stakeholder of a media company was determined to make a drastic change to their website without the data to support it. 

The stakeholder thought the change would lead to a big win. Marc, on the other hand, felt like it wasn’t a good idea. Working with his UX team, he conducted research to confirm his hunch. He recorded real-life feedback sessions with customers to validate the stakeholder’s requirements.

Turns out Marc’s intuition was right: the proposed changes would have led to a bad experience for website visitors. If anything, Marc is a prime example of why research is the key to making informed decisions. And Marc has learned his lesson:

I avoid similar fails today by conducting as much customer research as possible to improve customer centricity.

Remember to keep your customers at the heart of every marketing idea and decision so that you can determine if an idea is viable or not. It’s frequently the difference between crash-and-burn ideas and successful ones.

6. Test One Change at a Time

Great marketing comes from testing, analyzing, and iterating based on results. (It’s an art and a science.) As marketers, we’re always busy pushing campaigns out the door, but we need to remind ourselves not to get in over our heads. When testing, that means taking a step back and making changes one at a time, versus all at once. 

For instance, Casie Gillette, senior director of digital marketing at KoMarketing, redesigned a big website for a client that involved a ton of changes at once. Everything from updating URLs, switching CMS systems, and updating content. Her mistake?

We hadn’t tested moving a site to HTTPS and changing all of the URLs and content at the same time.

The modifications led to a massive loss in qualified traffic and leads all at once, plus a host of pesky technical issues. Casie knew page content revisions and testing were both necessary to improve relevance and ranking. To increase conversions, her team tested on-page tags, created guides to compete in SERPs, and even optimized their landing pages with CTAs, banners, and forms.

It was basically an all-out blitz to find what was working and how to replicate it across the site … It really came down to consistency, testing, and replication.

There’s no magical one-size-fits-all recipe for success. But you can focus your testing efforts rather than tackling everything at once. That way, you can identify what works and what doesn’t. (It’s a testing best practice.)

Keen to grow your conversion rates? With our landing pages, you can experiment on your messaging, page design, and forms to validate ideas and score more conversions with A/B testing.

7. Set Realistic Goals and Expectations

Goals are the building blocks for any marketer. They provide clarity and guidance for when you start putting together a marketing strategy and action plan. But making sure your goals are well-defined and realistic is often easier said than done, especially if you’re ambitious.

Sphoorti Bhandare, PR and content whisperer—yep, you read that right—prepared for a big store launch one month in advance. Despite her proactive planning, though, things started to fall apart one by one a week before they were set to go live.

With little time and no contingency plan, Sphoorti postponed the launch. While not ideal, it did help her realize where she failed:

We hugely underestimated the effort required to make the launch successful and didn’t really write down a crisis communication plan for worst-case scenarios.

Many things can go wrong on a marketing campaign. When you start a new project, ask yourself: do I have the time, resources, and budget I need to accomplish everything? Then set specific, realistic marketing goals and inform everyone of them. 

The biggest lesson I took from this was to set realistic goals and expectations and consistently monitor them. Not only for the marketing team, but for every department, vendor, and executive involved.

Having a crystal clear vision of what you want to achieve can help hold you and your team accountable within a given time frame. If you aren’t able to reach your goals in the end, that’s OK. The beauty of goal-setting is taking a step back and seeing how or where you can improve next time.

(via Isaac Smith on Unsplash)

8. Create Clear Content Briefs

You’ve got your strategy. You’ve got your buyer personas. Now you’ve got to whip together some content that supports this overall strategy and speaks directly to your buyers. Before you do anything, sitting down to create a clear content brief is one of the smartest time investments you can make. 

(Believe me, you’ll thank yourself later.)

The best marketers would agree that a content brief can paint a clear picture for anyone you work with. Taru Bhargava of Foundation Marketing is one of them. 

When she first started out as a content marketer, Taru commissioned freelance writers to contribute long-form articles. To save time, she only provided them with a topic. Little did she know that this approach would backfire. 

Guess what? The lack of a detailed brief resulted in commissioned articles that suffered in quality. And, even more importantly, it turned into an enormous waste of time and effort. Realizing her blunder, Taru now follows a framework to include everything that’s required for someone to know before they create any content—the voice and tone, target audience, competitors, keywords, internal links, and more. 

Sticking to a content brief and overcommunicating the expectations is always a good strategy when working with freelancers … Providing them with as much info as possible in the first go is the best way to avoid the to & fro of edits.

Creating a content brief as your north star helps everyone understand what you want to accomplish with a piece of content. A brief can take the guesswork out of content creation, saving you time and money. 

Taru’s secret is this content writing brief template from CoSchedule. (She swears by it, so you know it’s good.)

9. Promote Visibility Within Your Team

We live in a fast-paced marketing world. Timelines fluctuate. Campaigns change. Requests from different stakeholders come at any given moment. Communicating these changes to every member of your team can be a significant challenge.

For example, Eric Siu, CEO of Single Grain, made a $500K deal to run a promotional campaign for a SaaS company. The problem? He didn’t tell his team, which left everyone scrambling at the last minute when orders started rolling in. Oops. You can imagine his colleagues weren’t too happy.

Eric admits he failed, but shares what he took away from the experience:

I learned that inter-departmental communication is important. It was a marketing fail, yes. But because so much of marketing is evangelizing your own marketing within the company, I lost respect and trust.

Making others aware of the work you’re doing—especially if that work involves them—is the key. When there’s so many tasks on the go, we need to hear something several times before we process it. Be extra clear and overcommunicate, so no one you’re working with gets caught by surprise. Then keep open lines of communication between you and any team you’re working with.

(via youxventures at Unsplash)

10. Prioritize Projects Based on Potential Impact

Managing a laundry list of priorities is probably nothing new to you. You’ve got top-level business objectives, departmental strategic initiatives, and marketing priorities to think about. But selecting the priorities that will have the greatest impact can be very tricky—especially when you have pressure from stakeholders to pursue certain projects.  

Back in 2018, the Unbounce content team wondered if Call to Action Conference might warrant a digital magazine-style recap. We wanted to write recap material to extend the lifespan of the live event. And we were inspired by Montreal’s G2 conference and the amazing, physical print book their organizers use to commemorate the experience.

Excited, the Unbounce team jumped at the chance to create a ‘zine. But, as Unbounce’s Head of Content Marketing, Jennifer Pepper, says, “there were several other content projects I should have prioritized instead. Despite eagerness and stakeholders hoping to squeeze the most reuse out of our live event, there were more pressing content priorities and I should have a) trusted my gut and b) made a more solid case for working on the projects I knew could have a greater overall payoff for the business.”

Call to Action Magazine was filled with curated insights from the 2017 Call to Action Conference.

Want to experience CTAConf this year and raise your marketing IQ? Check out the conference and workshop agenda for September 2019. Tickets are still available.

Jen now prioritizes far more ruthlessly, having learned to advocate for the right work more vocally. Her ultimate takeaway?

If you own prioritization, it’s up to you to uncover the opportunities and make sure you’re making the strongest case to stakeholders on the right stuff to create. As a content lead, it’s about how you can educate stakeholders so they understand why some things are more worthy of your team’s time than others.

11. Don’t Sell Yourself Short

Whether you’re leading a big marketing team or just part of one, it’s easy to get lost in the shuffle. Different experts have different opinions, and not everybody is right 100% of the time. How do you manage them?

Kasey Bayne, head of marketing at DataTrue, faced a difficult situation early in her career. Someone she was working with wanted to break into a new market by doing a big trade show. With no lead time or reputation in that industry (not to mention a very tight budget) Kasey had significant doubts. She voiced her concerns at first, but, against her better judgment, eventually agreed to the move. 

The trade show turned out to be a flop. Kasey learned a valuable lesson nonetheless. “When you are the expert or marketing leader in your team, it’s important to be strong about your recommendations,” she says.

Prepare your case, bring your data, and your experience to present a solid recommendation as best as you can without being so quick to give in to others.

No matter your age or years of experience in the industry, trust your knowledge as a marketer. Don’t be afraid to stand up for yourself and voice your concerns or suggestions. (As Marc Bitanga would say, it’s even better when you’re able to back up those arguments with data.) 

If at First You Fail, Try Again!

Everybody makes mistakes. Everybody has one of those days.

From these 11 examples, we can see how even experienced, expert marketers can fail. (And fail again.) But, crucially, they transform their mistakes into insights about what not to do in the future. 

So if you happen to make a mistake—and you probably will—think of it as a learning opportunity. No need to wrap yourself in a blanket of shame; own your failures and turn them into your own personal ‘aha!’ moment. 

Go on—take chances, make mistakes, and get messy.

You’ll be in great company. 

Have marketing fails you’d like to share? Leave them in the comments below, and let us know what you learned.

11 Marketing Experts Share Their Marketing Fails (and Lessons Learned) published first on https://nickpontemrktg.wordpress.com/

[roypstickney]

11 Marketing Experts Share Their Marketing Fails (and Lessons Learned)

If you’ve ever failed in marketing, you’re not alone.

Nobody likes to mess up, but we’ve all been there. And what sets truly remarkable marketers apart from everyone else isn’t that they don’t ever make mistakes. They do. It’s just that they learn from their failures. 

As Barack Obama put it, “You can’t let your failures define you. You have to let your failures teach you.” (Thanks, Obama. No, really. Thank you.) 

With that in mind, we asked 11 experienced marketers to share what they’ve learned from their past blunders. These pros are living proof that we can learn as much from those times things didn’t go our way as we can from our biggest wins. As you’ll see, getting it wrong helped them grow their business, develop a customer-focused philosophy, improve their abilities as a leader, and much more.

So let’s dive right in.

Jump Straight to a Lesson Learned from a Marketing Fail

Target the Right Keywords

Develop Buyer Personas to Inform Your Marketing

Put QA Checks in Place

Add Automated Checks When You QA

Validate New Ideas with Customer Research

Test One Change At a Time

Set Realistic Goals and Expectations

Create Clear Content Briefs

Promote Visibility Within Your Team

Prioritize Projects Based on Potential Impact

Don’t Sell Yourself Short

1. Target the Right Keywords

Every marketer knows the value of organic keywords. Understanding what your target audience is searching for (and how you can rank for specific keywords) can help you optimize your campaigns and develop an effective SEO strategy. 

But what if a piece of content doesn’t rank at all? What if it ends up ten pages deep in the SERPs? What if it forever sinks to the deep Mariana Trench of Google?

Take Andy Crestodina, co-founder of Orbit Media Studios. He spent over 20 hours on a 4,100+ word article (and a 12-minute video) only to have it fail as a piece of organic content. He figured he’d optimize it for a popular phrase, get it to rank, and win a steady stream of traffic. But that never happened. 

Andy owns up to why he failed:

I didn’t dig in deep enough while checking competition. As it turns out, the high ranking pages have huge numbers of inbound links. Even though the difficulty score was low, the linking root domain numbers were off the charts. But I never checked.

Andy learned a powerful lesson: your content won’t rank by magic.

You need to put hard work into targeting the right phrases that can compound traffic over time. To avoid losing your content in Google search obscurity, take the time to research the keywords you want to target first. 

Hit the sweet spot for keywords by researching phrases that have a good mix of search volume, general intent, and popularity among competitors. (Source: Orbit Media)

And don’t just look at search volume. Make sure you check out how your competitors rank to ensure you’re ready to take them on. You want to know if you’re going up against the Mohammed Ali of content before you throw your hat into the ring.

2. Develop Buyer Personas to Inform Your Marketing

Buyer personas go hand-in-hand with your marketing strategy. They’re the needle to your strategy’s thread. The arrow to your bow. The Kim to your Kanye. (You see where I’m going with this.) 

Defining the ideal customer audience you want to attract will help you market to them in the best way possible. However, to build robust, accurate buyer personas, you need one thing: data. 

Early on in his career, Brandon Gains, VP of marketing at MonetizeMore, created personas from gut-feeling alone. He didn’t validate them through qualitative research, surveys, and interviews. And without a formal process to gather internal and external data points, he failed to involve a large customer base in his company’s marketing and product direction. 

But to get internal buy-in from department heads, he needed more than his gut feeling. He needed to fix how his company crafted buyer personas:

We reignited our user research process and developed more of a scientific approach that incorporates internal and external research into concrete deliverables that I use across the company.

Like Brandon says, you need to ground your buyer personas in research and data—a.k.a. the real world (and, no, not the MTV version). Even though it’s nitty-gritty work, setting up customer interviews and internal discussions across your sales, customer success, product, and marketing teams will pay off in the long run. You’ll be able to better determine your objectives and anticipate consumer needs. 

With buyer personas, you can know how to tailor your content to segmented audiences who have different preferences, challenges, and pain points.  (Source: Unbounce)

Like any dynamic duo, buyer personas can also help you create segmented landing pages that speak to different types of visitors. You can use different templates to quickly build customized pages that’ll give them exactly what they’re looking for.

3. Put QA Checks in Place

Quality assurance is one step you should never skip, but it’s also the one you’ll be most tempted to skip. Don’t do it. Resist the urge. QA is key for ensuring a high-performing campaign.

Put yourself in your visitors’ shoes: how would you feel if you clicked on a link that went to a nonexistent page? Frustrated or annoyed? Definitely. Content with typos and broken links can create a bad first impression.

It’s what happened to Scott McLeod, chief of staff at Resident. He learned the hard way about the importance of QAing after running ads to a landing page that didn’t load. (It’s a big no-no considering you need to ensure your site loads as quickly as possible.)

His advice? Be extra mindful to check that you inspect every aspect of your campaign. Or, to put it another (bigger, bolder) way:

You need to provide a seamless user experience for your customers that will make ’em love you. Treat it like a first date: you want to please your prospects from the get-go so they’ll have more reason to want to keep dating you. (And maybe even marry you.) 

We specifically have the team follow from ad to checkout, especially for major sales or mass communications … Creating redundancy in the QA process or review process leads to less mishaps.

When you have ten other things to do, it can be tempting to call something done without going through the crucial last step of QAing it. But ensuring you take this time will save you a lot of headaches in the long run.

4. Add Automated Checks When You QA

While Scott recommends running QA checks, Derric Haynie, chief ecommerce technologist at Ecommerce Tech, takes it one step further. He suggests using automated checks to protect you from tiny errors that can cost you your ad spend. The best marketers do this to provide the best post-click experience from ad to landing page.

This realization didn’t come to Derric immediately, though. It’s something he learned after running a PPC campaign that drove to a dead 404 page. A small oversight that meant throwing $10K down the drain. (In McDonald’s terms, it’s equal to 40,000 Chicken McNuggets. A whole lotta nugs.)

Luckily, Google Ads includes final URLs to help make sure your ads are leading your prospects to the right landing page. Derric uses this field, especially for dynamic ads.

Nowadays, I’m using Google’s ‘Final URL’ column and either copy/pasting or exporting all the URLs to check the final destination works. They now have a landing page validation checker built in.

The Final URL is the address of the page in your website that people reach when they click your ad. (Source: Google)

Incorporate automated QA checks into your process wherever you can. You’ll minimize human error, and might even have some budget left over for a 10-piece McNugget. 

5. Validate New Ideas With Customer Research

These days, data needs to be the driving force behind any marketing strategy. It’s a must-have for any business’s growth and success. (If Obi-Wan Kenobi were a marketer, I’m sure he’d want you to use the data force.) 

But don’t take my word for it. Here’s Google:

Even Google reports that leading marketers believe how they apply their data is crucial to success. (Source: Think with Google)

Ask any great marketer, and they’ll tell you that they don’t make business decisions without the data to back it. It’s a best practice, but one we can easily forget.

Marc Bitanga, CEO at Agencio, almost committed an epic fail because a key stakeholder of a media company was determined to make a drastic change to their website without the data to support it. 

The stakeholder thought the change would lead to a big win. Marc, on the other hand, felt like it wasn’t a good idea. Working with his UX team, he conducted research to confirm his hunch. He recorded real-life feedback sessions with customers to validate the stakeholder’s requirements.

Turns out Marc’s intuition was right: the proposed changes would have led to a bad experience for website visitors. If anything, Marc is a prime example of why research is the key to making informed decisions. And Marc has learned his lesson:

I avoid similar fails today by conducting as much customer research as possible to improve customer centricity.

Remember to keep your customers at the heart of every marketing idea and decision so that you can determine if an idea is viable or not. It’s frequently the difference between crash-and-burn ideas and successful ones.

6. Test One Change at a Time

Great marketing comes from testing, analyzing, and iterating based on results. (It’s an art and a science.) As marketers, we’re always busy pushing campaigns out the door, but we need to remind ourselves not to get in over our heads. When testing, that means taking a step back and making changes one at a time, versus all at once. 

For instance, Casie Gillette, senior director of digital marketing at KoMarketing, redesigned a big website for a client that involved a ton of changes at once. Everything from updating URLs, switching CMS systems, and updating content. Her mistake?

We hadn’t tested moving a site to HTTPS and changing all of the URLs and content at the same time.

The modifications led to a massive loss in qualified traffic and leads all at once, plus a host of pesky technical issues. Casie knew page content revisions and testing were both necessary to improve relevance and ranking. To increase conversions, her team tested on-page tags, created guides to compete in SERPs, and even optimized their landing pages with CTAs, banners, and forms.

It was basically an all-out blitz to find what was working and how to replicate it across the site … It really came down to consistency, testing, and replication.

There’s no magical one-size-fits-all recipe for success. But you can focus your testing efforts rather than tackling everything at once. That way, you can identify what works and what doesn’t. (It’s a testing best practice.)

Keen to grow your conversion rates? With our landing pages, you can experiment on your messaging, page design, and forms to validate ideas and score more conversions with A/B testing.

7. Set Realistic Goals and Expectations

Goals are the building blocks for any marketer. They provide clarity and guidance for when you start putting together a marketing strategy and action plan. But making sure your goals are well-defined and realistic is often easier said than done, especially if you’re ambitious.

Sphoorti Bhandare, PR and content whisperer—yep, you read that right—prepared for a big store launch one month in advance. Despite her proactive planning, though, things started to fall apart one by one a week before they were set to go live.

With little time and no contingency plan, Sphoorti postponed the launch. While not ideal, it did help her realize where she failed:

We hugely underestimated the effort required to make the launch successful and didn’t really write down a crisis communication plan for worst-case scenarios.

Many things can go wrong on a marketing campaign. When you start a new project, ask yourself: do I have the time, resources, and budget I need to accomplish everything? Then set specific, realistic marketing goals and inform everyone of them. 

The biggest lesson I took from this was to set realistic goals and expectations and consistently monitor them. Not only for the marketing team, but for every department, vendor, and executive involved.

Having a crystal clear vision of what you want to achieve can help hold you and your team accountable within a given time frame. If you aren’t able to reach your goals in the end, that’s OK. The beauty of goal-setting is taking a step back and seeing how or where you can improve next time.

(via Isaac Smith on Unsplash)

8. Create Clear Content Briefs

You’ve got your strategy. You’ve got your buyer personas. Now you’ve got to whip together some content that supports this overall strategy and speaks directly to your buyers. Before you do anything, sitting down to create a clear content brief is one of the smartest time investments you can make. 

(Believe me, you’ll thank yourself later.)

The best marketers would agree that a content brief can paint a clear picture for anyone you work with. Taru Bhargava of Foundation Marketing is one of them. 

When she first started out as a content marketer, Taru commissioned freelance writers to contribute long-form articles. To save time, she only provided them with a topic. Little did she know that this approach would backfire. 

Guess what? The lack of a detailed brief resulted in commissioned articles that suffered in quality. And, even more importantly, it turned into an enormous waste of time and effort. Realizing her blunder, Taru now follows a framework to include everything that’s required for someone to know before they create any content—the voice and tone, target audience, competitors, keywords, internal links, and more. 

Sticking to a content brief and overcommunicating the expectations is always a good strategy when working with freelancers … Providing them with as much info as possible in the first go is the best way to avoid the to & fro of edits.

Creating a content brief as your north star helps everyone understand what you want to accomplish with a piece of content. A brief can take the guesswork out of content creation, saving you time and money. 

Taru’s secret is this content writing brief template from CoSchedule. (She swears by it, so you know it’s good.)

9. Promote Visibility Within Your Team

We live in a fast-paced marketing world. Timelines fluctuate. Campaigns change. Requests from different stakeholders come at any given moment. Communicating these changes to every member of your team can be a significant challenge.

For example, Eric Siu, CEO of Single Grain, made a $500K deal to run a promotional campaign for a SaaS company. The problem? He didn’t tell his team, which left everyone scrambling at the last minute when orders started rolling in. Oops. You can imagine his colleagues weren’t too happy.

Eric admits he failed, but shares what he took away from the experience:

I learned that inter-departmental communication is important. It was a marketing fail, yes. But because so much of marketing is evangelizing your own marketing within the company, I lost respect and trust.

Making others aware of the work you’re doing—especially if that work involves them—is the key. When there’s so many tasks on the go, we need to hear something several times before we process it. Be extra clear and overcommunicate, so no one you’re working with gets caught by surprise. Then keep open lines of communication between you and any team you’re working with.

(via youxventures at Unsplash)

10. Prioritize Projects Based on Potential Impact

Managing a laundry list of priorities is probably nothing new to you. You’ve got top-level business objectives, departmental strategic initiatives, and marketing priorities to think about. But selecting the priorities that will have the greatest impact can be very tricky—especially when you have pressure from stakeholders to pursue certain projects.  

Back in 2018, the Unbounce content team wondered if Call to Action Conference might warrant a digital magazine-style recap. We wanted to write recap material to extend the lifespan of the live event. And we were inspired by Montreal’s G2 conference and the amazing, physical print book their organizers use to commemorate the experience.

Excited, the Unbounce team jumped at the chance to create a ‘zine. But, as Unbounce’s Head of Content Marketing, Jennifer Pepper, says, “there were several other content projects I should have prioritized instead. Despite eagerness and stakeholders hoping to squeeze the most reuse out of our live event, there were more pressing content priorities and I should have a) trusted my gut and b) made a more solid case for working on the projects I knew could have a greater overall payoff for the business.”

Call to Action Magazine was filled with curated insights from the 2017 Call to Action Conference.

Want to experience CTAConf this year and raise your marketing IQ? Check out the conference and workshop agenda for September 2019. Tickets are still available.

Jen now prioritizes far more ruthlessly, having learned to advocate for the right work more vocally. Her ultimate takeaway?

If you own prioritization, it’s up to you to uncover the opportunities and make sure you’re making the strongest case to stakeholders on the right stuff to create. As a content lead, it’s about how you can educate stakeholders so they understand why some things are more worthy of your team’s time than others.

11. Don’t Sell Yourself Short

Whether you’re leading a big marketing team or just part of one, it’s easy to get lost in the shuffle. Different experts have different opinions, and not everybody is right 100% of the time. How do you manage them?

Kasey Bayne, head of marketing at DataTrue, faced a difficult situation early in her career. Someone she was working with wanted to break into a new market by doing a big trade show. With no lead time or reputation in that industry (not to mention a very tight budget) Kasey had significant doubts. She voiced her concerns at first, but, against her better judgment, eventually agreed to the move. 

The trade show turned out to be a flop. Kasey learned a valuable lesson nonetheless. “When you are the expert or marketing leader in your team, it’s important to be strong about your recommendations,” she says.

Prepare your case, bring your data, and your experience to present a solid recommendation as best as you can without being so quick to give in to others.

No matter your age or years of experience in the industry, trust your knowledge as a marketer. Don’t be afraid to stand up for yourself and voice your concerns or suggestions. (As Marc Bitanga would say, it’s even better when you’re able to back up those arguments with data.) 

If at First You Fail, Try Again!

Everybody makes mistakes. Everybody has one of those days.

From these 11 examples, we can see how even experienced, expert marketers can fail. (And fail again.) But, crucially, they transform their mistakes into insights about what not to do in the future. 

So if you happen to make a mistake—and you probably will—think of it as a learning opportunity. No need to wrap yourself in a blanket of shame; own your failures and turn them into your own personal ‘aha!’ moment. 

Go on—take chances, make mistakes, and get messy.

You’ll be in great company. 

Have marketing fails you’d like to share? Leave them in the comments below, and let us know what you learned.