There’s a reason this article isn’t titled “How to Be Successful in Marketing.” The mere concept of success in a marketing strategy comes with so many variables and influences. Every business has different goals, resources, and know-how that impact its ability to create success. The best businesses that consistently find ways to grow are the ones that build consumer value.
Consumer value is the concept that what you offer as a business is worth buying into as a consumer. That could be a product or service, but it goes beyond that as well. Ensuring your marketing strategy is valuable for your audience means taking the time to learn their needs, study their habits, and find ways to keep them interested in everything you have to offer. Here are five ways you can start doing that with your marketing plan.
Marketing Should Focus on the Habits of Your Consumers
First and foremost, marketing needs to focus on consumer habits. If you go out and market your business to the ether, you’re going to draw attention from a fraction of the people you’d appeal to if you knew for whom you were truly marketing. Firstly, identifying the consumer base for your product or service narrows down who might want to buy what you’re selling. Then, you can take time to learn their habits.
Consumer habits come down largely to knowing where your consumers spend their time. For most businesses, that means “digital time,” such as websites, apps, and social media platforms. If you’re seeing that many of your target consumers enjoy using Pinterest, then find the best ways to utilize and advertise on Pinterest.
You have a million and one platforms at your disposal to reach customers. Focusing on the ones that are habitual for your intended audience saves you time and energy.
Keep Customers in the Loop Across Multiple Channels
As mentioned above, it’s rare to see consumers use only one digital platform for their online activity. If you know your customer base is going to be younger, then you can assume many of your target audience is on TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, and a slew of other apps. While you don’t need to utilize every single place you might find consumers, you do need to pinpoint which channels earn most of their time.
Your website can feature a blog to update your audience on new products or exciting sales. Additionally, your email marketing strategy can focus on short blurbs about noteworthy stories impacting your business. Social media channels that your audience uses can be a place to connect to their interests and needs. A well-rounded approach to managing a multichannel marketing strategy can go a long way.
Focus on the Most Impactful Social Media Channels for Your Consumers
Once you have an idea about where your consumers spend their digital time, you can assume some hold more sway than others. The Shop feature on Instagram is much newer than the Facebook Marketplace. Therefore, there’s a chance that when a consumer thinks about checking out products on social media, they lean towards Facebook over Instagram. If that holds true, and you end up seeing more sales from Facebook, you know that your focus should be on the platform with the biggest impact.
Other challenges with social media can include getting followers to become consumers. An organic social media strategy for e-commerce businesses requires everything from user-generated content to simply keeping your products in front of consumers for when they’re ready to buy. It’s a challenge, but one that requires your attention if you want to maximize your consumer value.
Get Others to Talk About Your Business
If you’re looking for loyal audiences online, then it’s helpful to get people talking about your business. Partnering with influencers can be a great tool to build marketing value. If you have people providing testimonials about your product or service online, then that can help spread the word and encourage two helpful phenomena.
Firstly, other influencers with large platforms might also want to work with your business. Secondly, customers who like your products and already bought something might be encouraged to share positive words about your business online as well. When in doubt, a fun giveaway that encourages tagging your business and other users is a great option to build a conversation about your value.
Use What Makes You Special to Build an Even More Loyal Audience
There’s probably something that you offer that the competition does not have to give consumers. Utilizing that can help you stand out among the ever-growing crowd of businesses looking to maximize social media and digital platforms.
Dynamic videos and images that focus on what makes you special can go a long way. Blogs and social posts are great, but to catch someone’s attention, it’s best to catch their eye first. Doing so helps them narrow into what you’re talking about and then that’s when you can prove to them why your business offers more value than the rest.
Conclusion
It’s an ongoing challenge to maintain and increase your value for consumers. Marketing value is something that industry experts talk a lot about, but it’s hard to pinpoint its exact formula. At the end of the day, that’s going to vary from business to business. The only constant in marketing is the need to adapt and innovate. By focusing on consumer value rather than the frills of a successful campaign, you’ll always be centered on what makes the biggest difference for a successful business.
The online marketplace is heavy on competition. To have success, you need to do more than just offer good products or services – you need to find ways to set your business apart from the competition. One way to stay ahead of the curve is ensuring you have competitor insights.
As important as it is to build a unique brand identity, you should still recognize that there is a lot you can learn from your competition. The websites of your competitors can offer a wealth of information that could help your business succeed.
With the right competitor analysis tools, you can learn so much about their traffic, the products they sell and different strategies they employ. In this post, we are going to cover some of the things you can learn by analyzing the websites of your competitors.
Maximum Potential for a New Campaign
With similar products or services, you are likely to have the need to run campaigns that have similar objectives to those of your competitors. Whether you are launching a new product or starting a new promotion, you can use the experience and insights of your competitors to your advantage.
Find the pages and content that would align with a similar campaign by your competitor. With the right tools, you can analyze the traffic to see how well they performed. You might also be able to glean insights like the marketing channels or ad strategies that offered the best results.
The Number of Customers They Have
It can always help to know what you are up against. With competitive analysis, you can get an idea of how many customers your competitors have. Some of these tools will let you sort results by URLs that have words like “pay”, “cart” or “basket”. You can then look at these pages and see how many unique visitors they have. Beyond that, you could apply the same strategy to individual products. This could give you some insight into how well your offers are doing by comparison.
Top Products or Services
Just like any other business, your competition is going to have strengths and weaknesses. Being able to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your competition can offer real value to your online business.
Look for the pages that perform the best and determine which products or services they support. Once you know their top products, you can start looking at things like the top traffic sources to those pages. If you have similar products, you can then start to develop a plan to work with those same traffic sources to promote your products.
As an alternative, you could also look for the products or services where your competition is weak. You could then try to focus on those products or services from your brand to capitalize on a space where you can perform well without as much competition.
Their Strongest Content
Developing a successful content marketing strategy is crucial for success with online marketing. While you are going to need to do your own keyword research and build a content marketing strategy that is unique to your brand, you can still learn from and adapt some of the content your competitors use.
Whether it is blogs, social media posts or anything else, the most successful content of your competitors should be of interest to you. If you see a blog that got a lot of traffic or a social media post that had a lot of engagement, you should try to see how you can do something similar to help your business. Beyond that, you might see ideas you thought were good but did not perform well for your competition. This might be a sign that the same content is not worth the time or effort.
Hidden Content
There are a lot of pages you might not see in the search results or the navigation of the website. As an example, they might have landing pages that were designed for different PPC campaigns. With the right tools, you can find these pages and learn from them.
As an example, you might find a lot of these landing pages listed as the top pages on the website. You wouldn’t want to copy them directly, but you could use some of the same tactics when you develop your own PPC campaigns. Along with that, you could also look at the traffic sources. If the landing pages are getting a lot of traffic from just one or two sources, you have to consider whether it is something you can integrate into your marketing strategy.
If you have been on Facebook long enough, you are sure to have seen some bad ads on the platform. Some might make you cringe, others might make you scratch your head and there are a few that will just make you shake your head.
With so many businesses advertising on Facebook, there are bound to be some Facebook marketing fails. While you certainly would not want to dwell on the misfortune of others, these terrible Facebook ads can be worth your time. Many of them offer great examples of what not to do when you advertise on Facebook.
This post will cover some of the worst examples of Facebook advertising from the past year, 2020. We will take a look at what went wrong and provide pointers to help you avoid ending up on one of these lists. We’ll also walk through some general steps to making your ads more dynamic.
The ad above asks users if they are afraid of being ugly. The ad fails because – aside from the obvious spelling mistake – it will make many in the target audience feel bad and insecure. Positive emotion is a better way to inspire action. Not to mention there are some serious issues with the wording.
Using pain points can be a good way to get customers to click on your ad, but it s
houldn’t be something that hurts their feelings. You introduce a problem and provide a solution. The product seems a little sketchy to begin with, but they still could have taken a positive approach. Instead of the headline focusing on how ugly the user might be, you turn it around and make it about beauty.
This one is a post and not an ad, but it offers a great example of what not to do with your Facebook marketing. PureGym shared a post to mark Black History Month with a “12 Years of Slave Workout”. You can already imagine how this would not go over well, but it gets worse when they compare the difficulty of the workout to slavery.
As bad as the post is, there are some good ideas behind something that was executed horribly. To start, they are trying to use a seasonal event in the marketing. That can often be a good idea. They also tried to link the ad to something in pop culture, which can also work well.
The problem is the content. Even with the best of intentions, the ad comes across as insensitive and trying to use one of the horrors of history for marketing is almost certain to fail. The best way to avoid this type of mistake is to have a review process for every post. One person might not see the problem with a post that could be offensive to many, but a review process will probably catch the issue. Getting a second person to review the content probably would have prevented this post from going live.
This ad is in Japanese but it is being shown to people that do not speak the language. The advertiser probably picked a targeting option that included people from outside of Japan. Regardless of the language your ads are in, it is a waste to have them appear before users that do not speak the language.
To avoid this issue, you just need to refine your targeting. If you are targeting based on interests, pages or some other broad category that could cover people outside the language group you are covering, you need to make sure to apply language-based targeting.
The online shopping platform Wish prides itself on having an insanely wide variety of products for very low prices. These ads show just how strange some of those products can be. The problem with these ads is that they are sending people ads featuring products that are just random and without consideration of whether the user might have any interest. Sure, some people will click because the products are so weird, but most of them won’t buy.
Being random, the ads waste money. You want to develop different audience segments and send them ads that feature products they might be interested in. The key to avoiding this mistake is to develop different target audiences and figure out what those audiences want from your business. It takes time and effort, but it is worth doing.
You can learn a lot from the best Facebook ads, but the lessons from bad ads are often more important. At best, bad ads are a waste of money and at worst, they can damage your reputation.
There are other Facebook ad mistakes that may not be as obviously offensive but can still have a negative effect on lead generation. For instance,
Not Having a CTA
Every Facebook ad has a goal of conversions.
Whether that’s measured in engagement (i.e. likes), app downloads, or purchases, a successful advertisement includes a clear CTA and callout within its copy.
PPI Check Me missed the mark with their Facebook ad, which has no discernible CTA at all.
The only option in this example appears to be to follow the link that is listed in a light (indiscernible, in our opinion) grey below the ad copy.
When you launch your strategy, be sure your copy directs users to a clear call-to-action.
Include the CTA button directly within the ad, and use your text to include a callout of the product or service that will compel people to convert.
Once you start adding more, there is a risk your ad will get shown to fewer audiences.
And that’s exactly what happened with this next ad.
Unbounce is the unfortunate ad example of choice here.
Their ad doesn’t necessarily seem like it belongs among the cringiest Facebook posts at first glance.
But, Facebook rated their image:text ratio as too high.
Why is that?
Well, their ad image is essentially all text on a monochromatic background.
The one image present – the book – also contains text.
So how can you avoid landing on a list of the worst internet ads for a mistake like this?
Facebook has a handy tool that checks the amount of text in your ad and rates it on a scale from low to high.
This can help you see if your ad will reach too few people, and adjust it if that’s the issue.
Visuals Gone Awry
Any successful Facebook ad strategy incorporates a graphic (i.e. video, static image, carousel) that grabs the user’s attention. Besides being eye-catching, the visual should also relate to the brand or promotion.
This probably isn’t news to you.
However, we’re emphasizing it because the image really is that important. One of the worst things you can do is create a Facebook ad that has a blurry, indecipherable, or messed up image.
The blurry image is difficult to read and fails to catch the viewer’s attention thanks to its transparent filter and lack of color.
Both of these qualities make the image itself entirely ineffective while taking attention away from the goal of the advertisement as a whole.
Don’t fall into the trap of a poorly-conceived ad image.
Instead, include a visual aid that supports the objective of your Facebook ad strategy.
Additionally, make sure it is a high-quality image devoid of too many additional details, like this rainy photo.
2020 presented challenges in marketing that a lot of us didn’t see coming. While crisis communication plans are a must, most don’t include precautions for a global pandemic.
While some brands rose to the challenge, others took a bad situation and made it worse.
A marketing project that falls flat is one thing, but a few of these unbelievably bad marketing campaigns of 2020 might keep customers away through the new year.
Here, we’ve gone through some of the roughest marketing campaigns of 2020. This isn’t an exercise in ridicule, but rather a helpful way to learn from some of the brands that definitely moved to damage control mode after these flawed approaches. Don’t just read through these examples. Take note of elements that might exist in your marketing plans. Let these hard-learned lessons be your guide to a better strategy.
The challenges of 2020 aren’t going away. We’re still all reeling from the COVID-19 outbreak and its impact will be felt for years to come. Your marketing plan is going to include considerations learned in 2020 for the foreseeable future, so it’s important to keep good and bad lessons in mind when shaping marketing plans for the future.
Without further delay, let’s get into some of the roughest 2020 marketing campaigns that left consumers and peers in the industry scratching their heads.
1. McDonald’s Backtracks on its Golden Arches Campaign
Image Credit: McDonald’s via CreativeReview.co.uk
Early in the pandemic, a phrase we didn’t yet have much familiarity with became one of 2020’s most popular two-words: social distancing.
If you recall back in March 2020, we didn’t yet know if masks helped. We weren’t sure if we should be spraying down our groceries with disinfectant. But we did know that staying apart helped curb the spread of the Coronavirus.
McDonald’s and their hired Brazilian agency, DPZ&T, decided to shed light on social distancing by separating the two Golden Arches famously associated with their fast food restaurant.
The decision to change the company’s logo was not made lightly. The impact of its message was intended to highlight what we could all be doing to make a positive impact on public health.
Instead, the public detested the move as all show and no substance.
Many social media users expressed their negative reactions to the Golden Arches campaign with accusations that McDonald’s wasn’t interested in supporting its team members.
Many reflected on interactions at the fast-food restaurant where employees didn’t seem to be practicing sanitation habits or provide customers with a safe drive-thru experience.
The lack of a public-facing plan towards handling COVID-19 for employees and customers was a lesson many marketing professionals learned early on in 2020.
Brands like McDonald’s who attempted to show solidarity through marketing content rather than transparency learned quickly that talking the talk wasn’t going to cut it.
Real success in marketing strategies during 2020 would come way of clear messaging, shared safety guidelines, and safety standards that keep employees and customers in mind.
2. Corona Seltzer and the Poorly Timed Marketing Push
Image Credit: Corona
Hard seltzers are everywhere now. It’s no wonder so many beer companies, like Corona, decided to get in on the game made famous by Truly and White Claw.
That said, launching a new line of products is tough. Especially during a global pandemic. And especially when your brand name happens to be similar to a new virus sweeping the globe.
When the COVID-19 pandemic put much of our lives on hold, travel was one of the first things to go. That meant a likely stop to vacations too.
As the end of winter led to a new season, many wondered if Spring Break would be impacted. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t, and much to the detriment of popular destination communities.
Nevertheless, Corona and their ad agency Constellation launched Corona Seltzer in 2020 with the tagline, Coming Ashore Soon. Yikes.
Aside from the clear association with COVID-19’s arrival to North America via overseas travel, Corona’s marketing strategy highlighted Spring Break activities heavily. Some of which they still ran to promote the new product line.
This is a great example of a brand deciding too much work was done to completely abandon a marketing campaign. As it turns out, losing time and resources spent to develop this campaign would have likely been less harmful than running it as it was.
After the ads debuted, Constellation stock dropped 6% and sales for Corona Seltzer were well under expectations. For everyone involved, it was a failure.
This goes to show how crucial it is to keep in mind the lasting impact of a marketing campaign. Yes, abandoning a well-funded and developed strategy is tough, but you have to ask yourself whether the alternative is worth it.
3. Taco Bell Launches Nachos Party Pack at Possibly the Worst Time
Image Credit: Taco Bell
Back in 2019, Taco Bell chose select locations to test sales of a new Nachos Party Pack. For a low price, you can feed many mouths. Sounds great right?
The only problem is that the launch of their new item was set to come on December 26, 2020. Yes, this was after the holidays where we were all asked to stay home if possible and avoid get-togethers.
The problem is that the holidays were only part of the problem in December 2020. Many areas were experiencing record hospitalizations from COVID-19 patients. LA County was even turning away patients arriving at area hospitals.
All of this was happening and the launch, which was announced back in September, was still set to go. Ads for the Nachos Party Pack even showed groups of people together inside eating.
At a time where buffets and indoor dining was limited to help curb the spread of COVID-19, an ad depicting get-togethers of friends sharing a meal from the same box of nachos was probably not the best move.
Simple changes like depicting families enjoying the box would have fit better, but Taco Bell stayed with their original plan.
Sometimes a full refresh of a marketing campaign seems taxing, tiring, and maybe even wasteful when it comes to time and money.
Still, it’s almost always worth it. Taco Bell immediately got criticized for not seeming aware of the current social climate surrounding get-togethers.
It wasn’t like they didn’t know this was the spirit of their ads. It’s front and center in the name of the product. A Nacho Party Pack immediately brings to mind parties.
The trick with a launch like this in 2020 is that it seems to encourage doing what health officials are asking everyone not to do. Everyone has free will, but plenty of people saw the ads and wondered why sharing food with others at a time where COVID-19 seemed to be getting worse was a good move.
The answer: it wasn’t a good move.
Confusing ads that take attention away from a product and put the consumer’s mind on things like pandemics, danger, and fear are never going to reach the goals you hope.
4. Burger King Ruins our Appetite
Image: Burger King
In 2020, many felt safer eating at home when they decided to let someone else do the cooking. Some states didn’t even allow indoor dining.
The takeout movement of 2020 led to many relying on delivery and drive-thrus in a big way. Fast food became an even more competitive market than usual.
These industries are a great example of how to properly pivot during unexpected events in the world.
There’s no doubt that brands like GrubHub and DoorDash grew in a big way during 2020. They couldn’t help that a global pandemic was happening.
They could, however, take the dismal state of the world and try to work tangible solutions into their efforts. Solutions like offering no delivery charge for local restaurants on the platform.
There’s no doubt that chain restaurants recognied the power of takeout and drive-thru services as well. Those two things are integral to the fast-food industry. This led to a very competitive year for all businesses in the sector.
As companies tried to jockey their way into a stronger position, Burger King decided to focus on their natural ingredients. Good idea, right?
Well, it is if you don’t rely on mold to prove that your burgers are fresh.
Burger King moved to offer plant-based options and a more diverse menu over the past few years. It’s working out well for them.
The concept of a burger with no artificial preservatives is definitely worth highlighting. The only problem is that they did so by showing their food get moldy.
While, yes, this does prove you don’t use preservatives, it also really doesn’t make me thing, “I want a Whopper.”
Intentions are only part of planning a successful marketing campaign. The execution comes from ensuring you’ve considered how consumers will react.
I don’t know how they didn’t catch on that this doesn’t give us much of a hankering for Burger King.
If anything, I don’t have much of an appetite at all now.
5. Airbnb Loses Sight of Housing Crisis While Trying to Support Its Hosts
Image Credit: Airbnb Community Blog
The most difficult aspect of 2020 was keeping things in perspective. There’s no doubt that Airbnb hoped to inspire positivity for its hosts with its Kindness Card campaign.
The effort called on Airbnb customers to send a “thank you” card to hosts on the platform. Included was an area where you could add a donation to their business.
While it’s true that the travel industry took a huge hit during COVID-19, this effort to help those who rent their home to others was a bit shortsighted.
Many pointed out that amidst eviction moratorium and record unemployment that calling for donations to rental owners might not look very “aware.”
As expected, the effort didn’t earn Airbnb a lot of kudos. At a time where they should have been pivoting their efforts in positive ways, this didn’t bode well for an already disappointing 2020.
Again, intentions aren’t everything. Executing a proper marketing campaign comes down to everything from what people will think to how you introduce the campaign to the public.
Don’t let these bad marketing campaigns of 2020 scare you. Instead, let’s go over a few lessons we can take away from these worst case scenarios.
After all, the troubles of 2020 didn’t magically go away when the clock struck midnight on New Year’s Eve.
There’s still a lot of work to be done to make 2021 the first year of real recovery following last year’s endless stream of bad news.
How to Avoid Disasters Like These Unbelievably Bad Marketing Campaigns
In hindsight, these bad marketing campaigns seem like no-brainers. A lot of them leave us wondering how they ever made it as far as the implementation phase. Even in years without a global pandemic, these marketing mistakes still happen.
During strategy meetings, a few things can happen that lead to marketing disasters like these. Most notably, a lack of diversity in opinions and insights can let groupthink lead the way straight to a bad campaign.
The integrity of a brand, its products, and even its clients can deteriorate when a bad marketing strategy does damage in the way these campaigns did. Sometimes, the solution to avoiding these problems is as simple as hiring a trusted and established marketing agency.
A mistake is only a mistake if you don’t learn something from it. Then, it becomes a lesson. We can learn a lot of lessons from 2020’s most miserable marketing campaigns.
By learning from the mistakes of 2020 that others companies made, you can start to shape your future plans. With the help of marketing experts with experience in assisting brands reach their full potential, 2021 could be more than a rebound year.
It could be your year to end up on a best marketing campaigns list. Better than the alternative, right?
Common sense, creative thinking, and not copying the mistakes of the examples above. That’s a great start to what could be a great year for your business.
Image Credit: McDonald’s via CreativeReview.co.uk
Image Credit: Corona
