Anyone ‘s marketing campaign can fail if certain rules aren’t followed. It’s just the nature of the business. Having failed, the best thing a marketer can do in planning the next campaign is to have a solid understanding of why the previous campaign failed, and how to avoid repeating the same mistakes. The following are some tips on what you can do to avoid the most common, costly marketing mistakes:

  1.  Establish analytic goals BEFORE the campaign starts. If you fail to establish analytical goals at the start of a campaign, it will be next to impossible to measure your return on investment. Objectives will of course vary from campaign to campaign; one objective might be to increase sales, while another might be to increase web traffic. Additional marketing objectives may include a bigger social media presence, creating and testing new products, or increasing sales. Objectives must be clear and communicated at the beginning and along the way. This is the only way to build from insights gained.
  2. Use social channels to amplify your brand. Another costly mistake that marketers make is failing to amplify their brand across their social channels. Your website is a brand, and ultimately, a customer experience. Branding, is the technology and the tools that helps marketers advance their narrative so that it remains in the consumer’s mind. The experience mentioned is that action which brings a person into a meaningful relationship with your product or service. Your brand is your narrative.
  3. Make sure you know the difference between digital marketing and branding. Many also fail to understand the difference between digital marketing and digital branding. Digital marketing is the act of spreading the word about your product or service. Its goal is to communicate values to your customer base. Branding, if effective, will remain well beyond your marketing efforts. Digital marketing can attract and activate those one-time buyers. It’s your branding that will build loyalty and cultivate a lifelong relationship with customers.
  4. Do your market research. Forming false assumptions about a target audience is huge. The wrong audience can make or break a campaign. Finding the right audience can start with putting yourself in your customers’ shoes. You need to know and understand their problems, and be able to communicate how your business can provide their solution. Another way of defining your customer base is to thoroughly assess your present customers. Your current, loyal, customers will have something in common. If the diversity of your base has expanded, then you may have to wait for additional patterns to develop. This provides an excellent opportunity to do a little customer segmentation while experimenting with ways to collect relevant information.
  5. Don’t jump on every bandwagon. A huge marketing mistake can be pursuing trends for fear of missing out on business opportunities. Not every trend will be good for your business. It has to be the right move for your business and not some other brand. If customers think the trend is stupid, your business will look suspect by association.
  6. Always provide quality content. Failing to provide great content is another shortcoming that many marketers make. Marketers sometimes forget that more views don’t always equal more sales. Good content can improve sales. Good content can also move a website up in ranking.
  7. Watch analytics for the data, and make sure you target the right metrics. Failing to leverage analytics is another bad marketing habit to avoid. Analytics can provide a strong sense of direction. The second mistake, concerning analytics, is choosing the wrong set of metrics to measure. Some metrics may look good, and even let marketers get a glimpse of market performance, but they still cannot help marketers make decisions.

With all the right marketing tools at their disposal, marketers are still left scratching their heads wondering what to do next. The first touch point can be the most important. If you can explain what you do for people, there’s a strong likelihood they’ll decide to do business with you.