#thank you to everyone for the suggestions & for pointing out broken links/typos

[literaryvein-reblogs]

When are you updating the masterlists? No rush tho! 😊

All edited :)

Word Lists

Writing Basics. Grammar. Refreshers.

Writing Notes & References

Writing Prompts

Writing Worksheets & Templates

Character ⚜ Plot ⚜ Worldbuilding ⚜ For the Poets ⚜ Tips & Advice

Writing Resources PDFs

[humaudrey]

TheThings is back on their bullshit

(WARNING: LONG RANT AHEAD!!!!)

Anyone know how to delete a YouTube video from someone else's channel (or just their entire channel all together) because...

This

Is SO

I don't even have the words!!!!

Once again, your girl watches one of their videos (several times unfortunately to really analyze this ish) so y'all don't have to and let me tell you, this one is 1,000,000x more infuriating than the one when they belittled Uma to lift Mal and make her better in comparison (link to my post on that here).

I've been recommended this video so many times since the trailers for D3 dropped and when I saw the title, I KNEW I was gonna hate it and low and behold, I DID!

So let's go over their "5 Signs on why Audrey is the real threat", shall we?

#1. Audrey's Outburst

So, their first piece of evidence as to why Audrey's the unfathomable dark force (their exact words) is because of the fact that Audrey yelled no as Ben proposed to Mal, "ruining their beautiful moment". They then explain that it would be "natural for Audrey to be jealous since she is Ben's ex-girlfriend", being perfect okay with the ugly "black, bitter, ex-girlfriend" trope that many have loved to stick onto her in their fanfics (I see y'all 👀), and then compares that moment to when Ben asked Mal to be his date for coronation in D1, stating that she didn't react so strongly before, so why now? EXCUSE ME?! Our girl left the Tourney Field crying that her BOYFRIEND had serenaded another girl with a love song, and not a single person ran after her. She had every reason to be upset then, too. Who's to even say why Audrey's saying no? It could be a terrible misdirect on the trailer's part. The theory that Audrey's possessed is swirling around everywhere, maybe it had already begun to take effect, which is why she's "acting so strangely". D3 hasn't even been released and they're already villainizing her. Figures.

They also use the typical argument that Audrey's into titles and she wants what Mal has, and that she didn't want Chad because he was merely a prince.

She doesn't want Chad because CHAD CHARMING IS A MANIPULATIVE TOOL! Ask Evie! Chad only thinks that being king would get Audrey's attention. You wanna talk about jealousy? Titles? If ant character is jealous of anyone's titles, it's Chad freaking Charming, not Audrey.

#2. The Crown

An obvious piece of evidence is the fact that "Audrey" steals the Queen's crown and Maleficent's scepter from the museum. Whatever, right? They assume that Audrey's faking her slumber when the sleeping spell hits, giving her an alibi. They then have the FREAKING AUDACITY to say that AUDREY, a non magical princess, who has been so anti-magic since D1 (with a grandmother who she loves dearly, that's triggered by the mention of said spells and curses), was the cause of the curse. Their evidence? Well, her family's VERY familiar with it, so it makes sense, right?

NO!!!!

Audrey has NO magic whatsoever!!! Did they forget that? The only reason her family is "so familiar" with the sleeping spell is because THEY ARE VICTIMS OF SAID SLEEPING SPELL!!!! And it's not like she could cast it, because, again, AUDREY HAS NO MAGIC!! If anyone is familiar with a sleeping spell, it's Mal. After all, she almost put Evie under just so she could grab her mother's specter from her.

How dare you take an Innocent family's trauma and turn it around to make them the bad guys?

#3. The Scepter

They continue to say that "Audrey" is to blame for the sleeping spell, rather than Celia, Hades, or Uma because "Audrey" has the specter. And immediately, they suggest that maybe Audrey's not working only. You wanna bet who they hinted Audrey was cooperating with?

If you guessed Uma, you'd be correct. All because Uma's seen laughing in her teaser. WHAT?! So, not only do you attempt to take Audrey's entire character and drag it through the mud, you take ANOTHER black girl's name that you've already tried to ruin and tarnish and say they're working together because they're BITTER?

If they're BITTER, it's ONLY BECAUSE YOUR WHITE, PLAIN, BARNEY COLORED DRAGON FAIRY PRIVILEGED PRINCESS PROSPECT FAVE had treated them HORRIBLY.

They end their third sign with the line "We knew Audrey was a mean girl, but we didn't think she'd stoop so low".

The meanest thing Audrey has ever done INTENTIONALLY, was 1.) Tell Evie that she and her family don't have a royal status in Auradon (to which, she is technically correct) and 2.) Tell Mal that she and Ben wouldn't last because she's "the bad girl infatuation".

Jane should be branded the mean girl because she turns on the one girl that helped her with her rise to popularity (which, granted, was for malicious INTENTIONS and caused EVEN MORE self esteem issues by degrading her).

MAL should be branded the mean girl, if anyone! She's:

Dumped rotten shrimp on her former best friend because she laughed at her

Forced a guy to throw a party since his mother was away, knowing that his abusive mother wouldn't be okay with it

Then locked a girl in a closet full of BEAR TRAPS at said party all because she wasn't invited to her birthday party when they were SIX YEARS OLD

Dumped lye on another former best friend's hair because she DIDN'T WANT TO BE COMPARED TO HER

Told another girl that all she had going for her was her personality, so she needed the wand to make herself pretty

ROOFIED HER SOON TO BE BOYFRIEND INTO DATING HER IN THE FIRST PLACE JUST TO GET A FRONT ROW SEAT AT HIS CORONATION SO SHE COULD STEAL THE WAND

AND TAKES SAID WAND FROM THE GIRL SHE EMOTIONALLY MANIPULATED EARLIER AND POINTS IT DIRECTLY AT AUDREY ALL BECAUSE SHE KNEW THAT MAL WASN'T GOOD FROM THE JUMP

Let's see a video ranking Mal's top five worst moments, huh? There's plenty of those to use for a freaking video.

#4. It's All About Mal (sounds like D3)

They start this point off with: "Audrey has beef with Mal".

AS SHE SHOULD!

They use the fact that Mal stole her boyfriend and her title and their families history with one another, so Audrey has this motivation to ACT OUT AGAINST HER ENTIRE COUNTRY? Not buying it! I won't buy it, especially since both parties seemed to have made amends at the end of D1 when Mal silently curtsies as a lame form of an apology that Audrey gracefully accepts anyway like the future Queen of Auroria would. Audrey's even seen bowing willingly at the end of Set It Off, and is even cheering and dancing with her friends as Mal and Ben share their moment under the fireworks, so clearly, Audrey's not broken up about it in the slightest.

They propose a theory that Audrey's absence in D2 is because she's planning her revenge in Sherwood Forest, and that she doesn't have car troubles because "Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather should be more than capable of handling it, so she's only calling Chad to help her plot her scheme.

Whatever they're smoking, I want it.

Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather can't help Audrey with her car troubles because of the MAGIC BAN!! They needed Chad to help with her car.

And I HIGHLY DOUBT that Disney would plan something so carefully since the entire series is branded with plot holes and inconsistencies anyway, so... 🐸☕

#5. Face Off Time

Their final point states that Mal has to face off against the enemy and they use the first teaser of dragon-Mal blowing fire at "Audrey" on top of the castle, and the card at the end that says "betrayal", that Audrey has betrayed all of Auradon. And since Mal only turns into a dragon against SERIOUS ENEMIES LIKE UMA IN D2, Audrey has to be a REAL THREAT.

Thank God they're probably not making a D4, because if they continue this trend of WOC wronged by Mal as the villain, I'd be scared for Evie...

So, in their words, Audrey and Uma, two of the few black girls in the entire franchise who have every God given right not to like/trust Mal, are Mal's MOST SERIOUS rivals, as if Hades doesn't at ALL pose a threat to Auradon. No, Audrey is So mUcH MOre THreATEninG thAN ThE GOD OF THE UNDERWORLD, SO SHE MUST BE STOPPED!!!

I see you, TheThings, and if I didn't despise your channel before, I hate it that much more now after enduring 5 minutes of hell with you guys.

AND, TO TOP IT ALL OFF THEY CLEARLY SHOW THEIR BIAS OF MAL OVER AUDREY!!

Like, just say you're racist and GO! Audrey's clearly influenced by some magical being, whether it be Hades (WHO WE SEE DOING SOME KIND OF MAGICAL RITUAL WITH HER AND HIS EMBER IN A TRAILER, BUT I GUESS THEY CHOSE TO IGNORE IT FOR SOME REASON 🐸☕), Dr. Facilier, Celia, or maybe even Maleficent. Your reasons for making Audrey the villain are pathetic, and I wish I could block a YouTube Channel so I would NEVER see another video from your channel ever again.

I'm so sick of how "mean" brown girls are treated in media AND fandoms. Why does Audrey get all of his libel while Mal gets away with EVERYTHING? Why are the Cheryl Blossoms, the Quinn Fabrays, the Kitty Wildes, and every other mean girl that Emma Roberts has ever played are so praised and are instant fan favorites while the Josie McCoys, the Santana Lopezes, and the Brees are seen as the bullies when, at the end of the day, they're both different sides of the same damn coin?

And if you don't see a problem with this, then, newsflash, you are the problem!

So, I end my rant with this:

And a short tag list containing: @amityravenclawelf and @coco-rena because I know these two are looking forward to this!

Have a wonderful day everyone!

And I apologize for the typos but I was HEATED!!

[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/

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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.