How to Fail at Marketing: Do These 5 Things

Oct 12

There’s a lot of marketing advice that tells you what to do to succeed. There are endless lists of things you can do to improve your strategies and boost your marketing effectiveness. But, you can still struggle to succeed even while following all the best marketing advice.

That’s because even when you do all the right things, you can still fail at marketing if you also do all the wrong things. There are major marketing missteps that can hold you back from success, no matter how closely you follow other best practices.

So if you feel like you’re doing all the right things in marketing but still struggling to see results, you might be engaging in bad practices that offset your best practices.

Here are a few things that will cause you to fail at marketing.

1. Neglect psychology and empathy.

Marketing is a lot of things, but it is nothing without psychology and empathy. You need to understand the psychology of your customers and build empathy for them if you want to create effective marketing campaigns. Creating messages of selling only features and your accolades isn’t going to get you far. It’s not about you, it’s about who you want to become a customer.

To reach customers and drive them to take action, you must know who they are and how to motivate them.

Conduct thorough customer research and build personas to understand the thoughts, needs, wants, and interests of your customers. Only then can you develop enough empathy for your customers that you will know how to reach them. You can position the need you’re solving for them with your brand and story to influence interest. You can identify search intent, craft compelling messaging, and pick the words and images your audience will pay attention to.

Play into the details that are specific to your target audience, and also incorporate other cues from psychology to make your marketing even more effective. Add social proof to build authority, and use messaging that plays into loss aversion, scarcity, and exclusivity to drive audiences to take action.

2. Use overly technical SEO strategies.

Search engine optimization (SEO) helps your brand show up when people search for keywords related to your products and services. Best practices for SEO include conducting

keyword research to see what people are searching for and then optimizing your website to be as appealing to search engines as possible.

You should follow SEO best practices if you want your brand to rank on search engine results pages (SERPS) -- but you also don’t want to overdo it.

If you focus too much on pleasing search engines, you may end up neglecting the audience that really matters: your customers.

Pay attention to technical SEO elements but focus on user experience. Don’t over-use keywords. Don’t write content like you’re only talking to Google. Instead, focus on being more human and mission-driven with your content and SEO. Improving user experience provides an obvious benefit to your customers, and it also supports SEO as improved engagement metrics can also improve SEO.

3. Focus on quantity over quality.

In marketing, success is often tied to metrics that show size and growth. When you see a high volume of followers or traffic, it feels like a win. The more the number grows, the more it feels like you are winning at your marketing strategies. But, you can fail at marketing by fixating on quantity.

Quantity isn’t always a good indicator of success. Quality is often a better reflection of value in your marketing results.

At the end of the day, marketing is done to drive sales. It doesn’t matter if you have an email list of 1,000 people or 1,000,000 if only five people buy. Both lists provided the same value. So, stop looking at quantity as a success metric when it comes to your:

Website traffic
Social media followers
Email list size

Driving traffic most likely to convert, attracting followers who are likely to be interested in your offerings, and building a list of subscribers who are actually going to read and respond to your content changes how you approach analytics.

4. Ignore your data.

Focusing on reviewing data at least monthly or the wrong interpretation of your data is a way to fail at marketing and so is failing to take action based on your data.

If you are following marketing best practices, you have heard that you need to track your data. You may even be doing it. You may have set up Google analytics, customer relationships management tools, and point of sale systems to collect data. But, are you using the data to make informed decisions about your business operations and marketing?

The only way to truly know what works in marketing is to test and review the comparative results trended over time.

You must track your data and also analyze it to see what works, what didn’t, and how you can do better in the future. Failing to turn numbers into useful, actionable insights can cause you to miss opportunities and repeat the same bad tactics that don’t produce valuable results.

Pay attention to your data and use it to reimagine your strategy around research-oriented, data-driven, and human-centered campaigns.

5. Keep marketing separate from sales.

When you have your head down in the marketing department, it can be easy to forget about what is happening in other departments. But sealing off the marketing department from the rest of the organization is a problem, especially when you separate sales and marketing.

The sales team works daily with customers. They have deep insight into customer needs and wants and can provide immense value to the marketing team.

The sales team knows what problems customers have, the questions they ask, and the language they use. Don’t put your marketing team in a silo. Instead, hold regular meetings with the sales team to get feedback from them that helps you understand prospect objections and motivations.

Don’t Fail at Marketing. Get Better Results.

To succeed at marketing, you can’t simply follow best practices. You need to also avoid bad practices that can cause you to fail at marketing.

Were you engaging in any of these bad habits? Do you need help revising your campaigns to use more empathy and data insights? Do you need to revamp a bad SEO strategy or otherwise move away from bad marketing habits? Let’s talk.

Amanda Sanz