Sometimes, for one reason or another, your B2B marketing campaign just doesn’t “work”. Your lead or traffic goals may not reach their mark, your team may get stressed, or you may just not complete the steps needed to reach your goal on time.
While many factors can affect your campaign success, sometimes the failure is due to a shortcoming in your marketing team or how they execute it. Realizing you have an issue with team execution is the first step to solving it. Here are the top five reasons why marketing teams can fail and how to solve them.
Trying to Solve the Wrong Problem
Buyers respond more positively to solutions that have pinpointed their specific pain point. If you don’t accurately address the right specific business issues, your campaign will be off to a rocky start. Every marketing campaign should focus on a specific need for the target audience – one that is real, can be measured, and can be solved.
Solution: Conduct research before starting a campaign to identify the real needs and issues of buyers. Read research papers, interview customers, and follow prospective and previous buyers to determine their challenges and goals. The better you know their pain points, the better your campaign will be at solving them.
Your Team Lacks Experience
Experiencing failure is a learning lesson. May younger marketers may not have any firsthand experience with failure. Sometimes campaigns may have too many novice marketers and not enough seasoned professionals to provide the experience needed to avoid failure.
Solution: Hone in on past failures and use them as a tool to learn. Use strategy discussions, role-playing, and creative brainstorming sessions that focus on past failures to highlight takeaways and build your team’s experience.
Your Team Lacks Needed Skills
A successful B2B marketing campaign consists of a variety of components that all must fit together, from robust analytics to creativity to strong SEO. Many times a campaign fails because one of those puzzle pieces was missing.
Solution: Supplement or educate your team. Bring in people with the individual skills needed to create a successful campaign. Encourage team members to take seminars or courses and to develop useful skills. At times it may be helpful to bring in an outside SEO specialist or data scientist.
Your Team’s Goals Aren’t SMART
Every good marketing campaign should start with a plan that includes specific goals. When goals are undefined or not tied to data, it is impossible to measure the campaign’s progress.
Solution: Your team needs to adhere to the SMART goal standard by ensuring all goals are:
- Specific, well-defined, and clear
- Measurable
- Attainable and possible to reach
- Realistic
- Time-based
Your Team Is Not Measuring The Results
Analytics are key to being able to determine what works and what doesn’t with a target audience. Without a B2B marketing strategy based on data and feedback, your campaign is likely to fail.
Solution: Identify the most crucial set of metrics that ties to your business objective. Then find the best marketing technology for your specific organization or industry to monitor and measure those data points.
