Why Marketing Plans Fail and How to Avoid it
Even with a solid strategy and careful planning, marketing plans can sometimes fail. A plan may fail to achieve business goals or it may stall out at one stage or another. Either way, a marketing team will face some hard questions. These four tips can help your team avoid (or adapt to) an underperforming program.
- Avoid Over-Reaching
The development of a truly competitive strategy requires an understanding of your customer and competition. Identifying your target market is be a challenge of every marketing strategy. Specifically identifying this group not just by demographics but also considering behavioral and psychographic segmentation provides a highly defined starting point for effective strategizing.
Learn from your competition to avoid costly and time-consuming missteps. Understand how they are positioned and if they have recently pivoted to a new market. Try their offering and identify how your company can effectively compete for your target market’s affections and loyalty. Use this information to keep your team laser focused on what is important. - Prioritize and Document
Use your target market and competitive intelligence to help prioritize tactics based on the resources at your disposal. Only then can a targeted plan with appropriate KPIs and an accurate goal-oriented timeline be developed. You will be pivoting and adjusting the plan as you start measuring your performance. To maintain your focus, don’t forget to document everything outlined. Update your strategy documents as you learn more about your customer, the competition, and your company’s distinctive talent capital. These documents will keep you grounded and remind you of why certain strategic decisions, as the team changes or the competition heats up. - Don’t Forget to Operationalize
Your team should spend as much time planning for the implementation of your strategy as they have developing it. Experience really makes a difference to ensure that the strategies your company develops are being executed in the most effective way. Ensure that each team addresses the following before implementation:- Pairs strategies with appropriate tactics
- Clarify accountability, responsibilities, and communication between marketing, sales and operations
- Recontextualize metrics into useful, relevant information sets. (Think dashboards and reporting.)
Since it is difficult to identify each and every way that marketing plans may fail, you should also develop ways to respond to setbacks before they occur.
- Measure and Communicate
Begin by clearly defining accountability and responsibilities as well as the reporting cadence for your team. Create a forum for accountable parties to review performance and share information with leadership and other teams. Sharing wins (and challenges) will help solicit ideas, motivate the company and operationalize accountability and flexibility.
Even though we all aim for success, knowing how to learn from failure can make your company stronger. The way that marketers choose to address setbacks, failures, and other fizzles can make the difference between a learning experience and a wasted opportunity.
