Let’s talk about something no marketer wants to talk about…failure. Sometimes you do everything in your power and you still fail to hit your marketing goals. It happens to the best of us (Carnage writers included).
When you do miss your goals, you gotta know what to do next. You can’t just ignore your misses and pretend that nothing ever happened. Well, you could, but then nothing is going to change. You’ll just miss your goals again next quarter. So here’s what you do:
Step 1: Reassess your goals and take a serious look at them. You should do this in one of two ways:
- Ask yourself, “are these even the right goals? Or are they focused on the wrong problem?” For example, if your goal was to get more leads by increasing organic traffic, great! But, if your conversion rate on organic traffic is 0.3%, not great. Increase your conversion rates by channel, before focusing on increasing traffic from that channel.
- Are your goals too aggressive? Yeah, you wanna set aggressive goals. But, if you set the bar too high, you’re just setting yourself up for failure. To fix this, start by properly reviewing trends. For example, if your goal is to increase organic traffic in Q3, but you’re comparing it to Q2, you might be setting yourself up for failure. Instead, look at year-over-year trends.
Step 2: Refocus. Okay, so you’ve reassessed, now it’s time to refocus. Make sure your entire team is on the same page. Anyone that might slightly impact your new goals should understand what changes are happening and why. Transparency is a big success factor when it comes to hitting your goals.
Step 3: Keep going! If you get a month into your new strategy, and things aren’t looking as good as you hoped, stay the course! Switching your strategy halfway through is likely going to make things worse, not better. It’s easy to forget that marketing success doesn’t happen overnight. Sometimes you just need that little reminder.
More insight inside →
