Business owners know they need marketing, but often they don’t know how to effectively manage a multifaceted marketing campaign. When this happens a common tactic is to try and use a broad scatter-shot approach to their marketing. The hope, and it is pure hope, behind this strategy is to try several marketing tools at once, in as many different directions possible, trying to get a response.
Sometimes they’re able to see measurable results from one of their salvos, such as seeing a one or two day spike in website traffic, or gathering more “likes” than usual on a particular social media post. But these results tend to be short lived, and don’t balance the losses from the salvos that came up blank. It’s a hot mess of marketing that’s unfocused, unmeasurable, and unmanageable and is doomed to fail.
What business owners really need to help their multi-platform marketing campaigns succeed, especially when marketing budgets may be tight, is a laser beam approach that has precision planning and sharply defined outcomes. Without a laser focus approach using certain marketing tools such as Pay-Per-Click (PPC), Search Engine Optimization (SEO), or Video Marketing can actually hurt the chances of success.
For example, every business owner knows they need to be doing social media. They know this because they heard some “social media guru” say so, or they’ve read about it in a business or marketing book. They also know their competition is on social media and they don’t want to be left behind. So in response, a lot of business owners will attempt to manage social media marketing on their own, or they’ll delegate it to an employee with an Instagram account—because that person obviously knows all about social media. The owner wants to create a video to post on VIMEO or YouTube. So the employee produces a video and uploads it. Over the next week the video gets a couple of views, but the business doesn’t see any response from it. The business owner decides social media isn’t worth the hassle and scraps the whole campaign, and the employee goes back to Instagraming with friends.
A video campaign planned and implemented using a laser focus strategy would have been more engaging and effective than “post and see”. Why? Because a laser focused campaign covers all the variables. It begins by answering key questions. Such as; what is the goal of the video? Is it informational? Is it instructional? Is it promotional? Will it be used on landing pages to convert traffic being driving to the company website site with PPC campaigns? If so, what will be the call to action on the video or landing page? And once the visitor has come to the landing page and viewed the video, what is the plan to collect that visitor’s information so that they can become a lead, or if they don’t decide to become a customer today, they can continue to remarketed to them in the future?
These are all the considerations that are answered and accounted for in a laser-focused marketing plan. Without accounting for all these variables, the chances of success are diminished and lackluster results can cause business owners to swear off marketing altogether, or to drastically scale back their investment in marketing efforts.
The cool thing about a laser is that it can also be used to polish and sharpen tools. In marketing, a figurative laser plan can be used to polish SEO keywords to improve organic website traffic, or to clean up a landing page by removing unnecessary elements making it easier for visitors to navigate and heed the call to action.
No marketing campaign is perfect. However, when a campaign begins to struggle it’s important to fight the knee-jerk reaction to scrap the whole campaign. In most cases, it isn’t the whole plan that’s flawed it is just a specific element. Instead of taking a loss on an entire campaign, use laser planning to burn out the ineffective elements and sharpen what is working.
About Janelle Page
Janelle is the founder and CEO of KickFire Marketing and has been the architect of successful and strategic, laser beam focused marketing campaigns for businesses large and small for over a decade.
Janelle is a highly sought after marketing consultant and popular speaker. She travels nationwide teaching marketing bootcamps to business owners and is regularly featured in industry magazines and the press for her business acumen and marketing expertise. Visit http://www.kick-fire.com to learn more about eliminating marketing waste.