5 reasons why online marketing campaigns fails

5 Reasons why online

marketing campaigns fails

November 7th, 2014 - Copyright ©Philippe Bussières, M.Sc

But not the only ones

Who should read this

Small or medium company decision makers with little or no

Web Marketing experience.

Web Marketing consultants seeking an objective and easy

way to explain some basics to clients with little or no

understanding of those basics.

Anybody who’d like to share ideas for another version of this

presentation with more advanced topics.

5 Reasons why online marketing campaigns fails - Philippe Bussières, M.Sc 2

A marketing campaign can be perfectly built, have great advertising

performances, but little or no return on investment…

Who’s guilty ?


Mostly, you’ll find those

1. Expectations

2. Planning

3. Targeting

4. Business / Industry understanding

5. Tracking

45 Reasons why online marketing campaigns fails - Philippe Bussières, M.Sc

Before we get started

In order to be successful, a campaign must

reach its objectives or provide good

insights about what to do to reach them.

55 Reasons why online marketing campaigns fails - Philippe Bussières, M.Sc

1 – EXPECTATIONSAre you clear on what you want to get from those campaigns?


What are your

expectations? Getting new clients (… Very creative)

How many ?

At what costs, each ?

Increase my website’s trafic (… Interesting)

Any kind of trafic?

What’s your target trafic with the campaigns ?

If you don’t talk about that with your campaign manager, he can’t

guess it for you. (He can try, but he can also be wrong)


How to manage them?

Discuss with your campaign manager

What’s the long term value of your clients?

100 $, 500 $, 10 000 $ Your overall strategy will be modified accordingly.

How many clients are you expecting?

1, 5, 25, 156 What’s realistic for the amount invested.

How will you be able to know it’s from the campaigns?

Ask your clients that are calling, tracking on the website, etc.

Make sure your campaign manager understands and agrees (not

commits, but agrees) to set those as target KPI, and that the data to

verify it is or will be available.


Clear example


I want the most Facebook Page Likes, Web clicks and Youtube views out of $1,000

Most social media interactions out of $500

Most likesout of $200

Most viewsout of $300

Most clicks out of $500

Most clicks out of $500

Now you’ll have a clear view of you overall budget’s performances and will beable to target problematic areas of your campaigns!

Hum… ok?

Makes kind of sense…

Let’s go!

How does a campaign fail?

Unshared or unset

expectations

No clear analysis scope

Unmetexpectations

No or limited

learningsFailure


By having unclear expectations, or multiple expectations for a single budget, youwill always have to reduce the focus of your analysis and weight the impact of each performance indicator to assess the overall performance.

How does a campaign

succeed?

Agreedexpectations

Clear analysis scope

Reached / Unreached

expectations

Usefullearnings

Success


2 – PLANNINGWhat kind of planning drives your campaigns, and maybe your

whole company?


Your plan is to ?

Increase budget after a high ROI week?

Double the budget when your order log is getting empty?

Change all the campaigns because you don’t like how the ad

sounds?

Throw a 20 % off on THAT morning when your boss came and

reminded you that you were getting close to the end of a quarter

and have not met the revenues yet?

Stick to a strategy?


Before answering,

remember People reading and clicking on your ads are real, have feelings, and

intelligence, and preferences for businesses acting a certain way, or

not.

How do you want to be recognized by your audience?

Does your online advertising behavior reflect the core values and vision

of your business or products?


Remember also that

Online campaigns can be optimized when the appropriate data is

available.

Changing campaigns before having sufficient data volume prevents

further optimization.

Being unable to optimize campaigns also means being unable to take advantage of the

most important benefit of online marketing.

It reduces your online marketing efforts to «spray and pray».


So… Work on a real game

plan

Get all the stuff you need at the early stages of your campaign

preparation.

Costs and volumes estimates (AdWords Planner, Google Trends, etc.).

How will you measure your objectives.

Ads that are aligned with your core values and advantages.

Additional ad sets to replace the current ones after a specific time if they are not meeting a

specific KPI, not before when you start to have doubts.

The goal here is to reduce doubt, not to take action based on it.

A determined checkpoint to review overall strategies, budgets and prices.

A more aggressive version of the campaign, in case you’d need it.

Recurrent evaluations and reports on the specified objectives.



Unrespectedor

unexistingplan

Improvisedchanges to campaigns

Poor dataUnmet

expectations

No or limited

learningsFailure


Improvisation will break data reliability and increase chances of misinterpretingthat data.

How does a campaign

succeed?

Respectedplan

Structuredcampaign

modificationsReliable data

Reached / Unreached

expectations

Usefullearnings

Success


3 – TARGETINGHave you shared the appropriate information with your campaign

manager?


Let’s say a business has

3 products

1 at $25, with 10 % profit



If you aim to gain 5 new clients with 100 $ in AdWords, you’d prefer to

give a higher share of your budget to your 250 $ product. This

information is critical to online marketing campaign profitability and

will influence the campaigns structure.


Let’s say a business sells

Books writen in english

Will you target…

books, +books, ‘’books’’ and/or [books]

New books, +New +Books, ‘’New Books’’, [New Books]

Will you avoid…

Used books, free books, ebooks

Books in German, Books in Spanish


Know the targeting

capabilities Keyword based (Mainly AdWords)

The keyword you will choose will fit to 1, up to thousands of different searchterms, depending of the targeting type

Keyword match

Broad : New Books Any search term containing books or a similar word [New boks, New boots, Neo book, book a new trip]

Broad Match Modifier (BMM) : +New +Books Any search term containing New and Books, no regard to the order [New books of Star wars, Books for new parents, Buy new books, New books for free]

Expression match : ‘’New books’’ Any search term containing New books in thatspecific order [Buy new books, Search new books, how to find new books for kids 3 to 5]

Exact match : [New books] Those exact words, or close variant, depending of the campaign settings [New books]

Keyword exclusion

You can remove keywords to prevent paying for useless search terms

o Example, you are likely to add ‘’free’’ or ‘’used’’ as a negative keyword, so +New +Books wouldinclude all search terms with New and Books, except those containing free or used.


Know the targeting

capabilities

Profile based (AdWords, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter)

Interests

If you’re in a narrow market, use narrow interests to filter your audience, you

can think of anything and have verification made.

Age

Gender

Job types

School Degrees

Seniority

Following a specific page


Insists on more precise

targets

Having a wide audience is good for brand awareness, but not to

get new clients at the lowest cost possible, unless your product fits

anybody.

You can handle both goals with 2 separate budgets if you want.

A/B test your interests

Keep track on each audience results over time. Those liking

poutine vs those liking car engineering



Weaktargetingstrategy

High sharesof budget

lost in useless

audiences

Blurred dataUnmet

expectations

No or limited

learningsFailure


Instead of using your $500 into your target audience and have $500 of usefuldata, you’ll have a smaller share of data value for your $500 investment.

How does a campaign

succeed?

Strongtargetingstrategy

Low shares of budget lostto uselessaudiences

Concentrateddata

Reached / Unreached

expectations

Usefullearnings

Success


4 – BUSINESS

UNDERSTANDINGThe campaign manager knows his tools, but you know your

business, and your market!


Share information

What you know

How business is traditionallymade in your industry

Competitor information

Specific terms related to yourproducts

Personas

Products strenghts and weeknesses

Sensitive topics in the industry

What your campaign manager knows (or can estimate)

Volume for a specific persona in a specific area.

Keyword searches and trends.

Keyword costs

Popular topics

Major competitors

Keyword relevance


Stay both opened to new stuff


You know are business has been made in the past X years.

It doesn’t mean it’s the only way through the Web.

Your campaign manager have an idea of what might work online

Doesn’t mean that you’re input won’t help.

You are your best representant, help your campaign manager to

reflect it.


Unsharedknowledge

Reducedcampaignrelevance

Lostopportunities

Unmetexpectations

No or limitedlearnings

Failure


Here, the reason why there is no or limited learnings coming from that kind of campaigns is that the data gathered may hide a problematic the campaignmanager won’t be able to detect.

How does a campaign

succeed?

Sharedknowledge

Highercampaignrelevance

Won opportunities

Reached / Unreached

expectations

Usefullearnings

Success


5 - TRACKINGWill you feed your campaign manager with the information he

needs to increase optimization capabilities


A classic in B2B

A phone number visible on every page of a Website, the only

phone number the company uses.

Do you have your call logs?

Can you analyze your log with your visitor over time?

Are you better to use a specific number for your Website (I think so)

How do you want any campaign manager to increase incoming calls

without knowing anything about how many and when they happen.


Prepare your tracking

methodology Primary objectives

Quote forms completed

Calls received

Request a call for completed

Orders completed

Secondary objectives (can help when there is not enough data about the

primary objectives)

Newsletter subscription

Brochure downloaded

Contact form completed

Email link clicked

Viewed product details

Created an account, etc.


Score your objectives


Example

Primary objectives are worth 100 points

Secondary objectives are worth 10 points (you expect that 10 newsletter subscription will bring you, sooner or later, the same opportunity that a quoteform does)


Weaktrackingstrategy

No or Limited

measurableresults

No or limited

performance assessment

Unmetexpectations

No or limited

learningsFailure


How does a campaign

succeed?

Strongtrackingstrategy

Highlymeasurable

results

Detailedperformance assessment

Reached / Unreached

expectations

Usefullearnings

Success


The hidden one…

Make sure that you keep your records of every campaign performances

to enhance analysis capabilities of your data over time.

Often, the greatest opportunities are NOT coming directly from within

the campaign, but from the global context of the campaigns within the

business.


ALLRIGHT… «I ALREADY

KNEW ALL THAT STUFF»I’m glad you do. Nothing in that presentation is new, yet those are

often neglected areas when a campaign manager is hired.


QUESTIONS?

I’LL BE GLAD TO ANSWER@PhilBussieres

ca.linkedin.com/in/philbussieres/

[email protected]


http://ca.linkedin.com/in/philbussieres/