What’s the ultimate point of creating marketing materials? It’s to sell a product or service isn’t it? So, if this is the case, judging the success of a campaign should be fairly easy. It can be judged a success if it brings in a certain number of customers and a failure if it doesn’t.

Though there are many ways of ensuring you have a good chance of running a successful campaign, there are no guarantees. Marketing is a blend of art and science, in other words it’s imperfect. If one aspect or another is poorly planned or executed, your campaign will probably fail.

So what do you do if you do run a campaign and it flops?

I recommend you take a look at three components of your marketing and think about changing one or more.

1) Change Your Focus – In my opinion, and it’s an educated one, most marketing fails because it lacks focus, or just as bad, focuses on the wrong things. Good marketing shows prospects, in as much detail as possible, that a certain company, product or service is right for them. Unfortunately, many companies and marketing people who should know better focus on what they feel is important rather than figuring out what is truly important to the consumer, you know, the person who will actually decide to spend their money… or not. Another sin which I’ve seen time and again while working for various companies, is the desire to put every possible offering in a single marketing piece. Whether companies are trying to save money by promoting different things at the same time, or feel that a single offering isn’t compelling enough doesn’t matter. When you try to appeal to everyone, you end up appealing to no one. Try to keep each marketing piece focused with a laser like intensity on a single offering, idea or promotion. Don’t confuse people or your marketing will fail to generate real response.

2) Change Your Vehicle – Are you sure the medium is not the problem? Sometimes we focus so much on creating the content, the vehicle becomes an afterthought. If you know your messaging is compelling, then have a look at how you’re actually delivering your message. For example, if you are trying to sell a product that appeals to the elderly, email marketing or online advertising probably isn’t the way to go simply because this demographic is not very computer literate.

3) Change Your List – Your message might be powerful, but what if you’re delivering it to the wrong people? For example, you might develop a killer direct mail package and mail it to an entire geographical area with high hopes of a great response. When no one gets in touch you start to wonder. Maybe it was because your package was trying to sell a high-end automobile to an economically depressed area of the city. This is an extreme example, but having a closer look at the market is often a good way of remedying poor response.

If you’ve found that your marketing isn’t getting the response you hoped for, Toronto Copywriter Brian Birnbaum can help. Getting in touch is as easy as clicking this link.