Imperfect Marketing Campaigns - Part 1

Show Notes

In this episode, Sally and Sam discuss the concept of imperfect marketing campaigns, exploring how to turn a potential catastrophe into a successful campaign and the importance of setting up a good system for dealing with potential issues.

(0:44) - Understanding where imperfections arise
(8:58) - Imperfections in Modern Marketing
(14:31) - Budgeting and its Effect on Imperfect Marketing
(16:55) - Agile Marketing and Learning from Experience
(20:43) - Communication and Debriefing

We'd love to hear your thoughts and experiences, so please share! Tweet us at @meanderspod, message us on Facebook, or email [e-mail]

Marketing Meanders is hosted by Sally Green, Partner at YMS and Senior Marketing Consultant, and Sam Birkett, founder of Amiable Marketing and Specialist Marketing Consultant.

Sally Green:

I am an experienced marketing consultant who loves helping people plan and implement successful strategies, creating campaigns that both strengthen the brand impact and increase revenue streams.

Working with me will give you a proper understanding of what does and doesn’t need to be done, how you can measure your success and how to get the best return on the effort you put into your marketing. Working with both large organisations and SMEs, I will help you set achievable goals, create a strategy and develop sustainable marketing plans that will show positive returns on your marketing effort.

Connect with Sally on LinkedIn.

Sam Birkett:

I specialise in higher and executive education marketing strategy, and operational and tactical support. Specialisms include LinkedIn lead generation and conversion campaigns, Persona and Proposition development, Content strategy, Webinar, Interview, Podcast and Video creation.

My consultancy works with institutions and organisations both in the UK and internationally, and over the last 16 years, I've been fortunate enough to work for world-leading organisations.

Connect with Sam on LinkedIn.

Creators & Guests

Host

Sally Green

Partner at YMS and Senior Marketing Consultant

Host

Sam Birkett

Founder of Amiable Marketing and Specialist Marketing Consultant

Editor

Nick Short

Graduate Podcast Producer at Story Ninety-Four

What is Marketing Meanders: The Marketing Podcast for Marketers and Small Business Owners?

Welcome to Marketing Meanders with Sally and Sam, the fortnightly podcast with over 50 years of marketing experience squashed into each episode.

We discuss the many aspects of marketing, emerging trends, and challenges we all face in marketing our businesses, sharing our own experiences and advice from industry experts. If you're a marketer, you'll recognise some of the stories we tell, and if you are a small business owner, hopefully, we'll answer a question or two.

Sam Birkett
Well hello everyone, welcome once again to Marketing Meanders with Sally and Sam, talking about marketing at the coalface in the real world, etc. and we are today going to be talking about imperfect marketing campaigns. Now, this is probably an imperfect title, I would suggest, I would also say, actually, we are in person are we not?

Sally Green
We are, we very rarely ever meet each other and just now we're imperfectly talking to each other face to face.

Sam Birkett
Which is very exciting because it's a good opportunity to actually be in the same space together and hopefully, we're coming through nicely, but poor Sally's got a bit of a cold as well. So you know, hopefully...

Sally Green
Completely imperfect.

Sam Birkett
Yes, exactly. So everything is imperfect. But we're talking about imperfect marketing campaigns. So I kind of got on to this, I think, because I was thinking about some times when I've been working on something, and I've been controlling myself, in a situation where I, by the politics or the timing or the resources, I can't do things the way I want to do them, or I'm working on a campaign with someone else, like another partner organisation, and I can't do things how I want to do them because there's constraints that they have in place, not necessarily, you know, their fault, it's just the way they do things, the way I do things, or the way my team do things, and therefore, it's an imperfect way of doing things because you want to do it in you know, this style, Style A and they do Style B, you have to work with it. But at the same time, I think we might go on to when marketing campaigns go wrong. Diagnosing understanding that, but do you have examples of where you've had to do an imperfect campaign Sally?

Sally Green
Managing stakeholders in marketing is always very, very difficult. So you've written a beautiful marketing plan, I've got one perfectly which then the whole marketing plan relied on, I was working for a publisher, and the whole thing relied on the author of the book, who had once upon a time when we started planning it, had been keen on doing lots of videos with people and interviews and being face to face and being out there. So we put the plan together around streaming him and doing this kind of thing. We planned the whole campaign all around that and then he said, I'm going to Barbados and can't do anything between this date and this date, and you think oh, bother. That's a kind of quite a key bit that's just popped out of the campaign, but you can't give up. You just have to okay, we're going to do this imperfectly and then we asked him, could you write some pieces for us? Can you draw pictures? Can we do something else, which isn't you speaking. So he did actually write some things, but it wasn't as powerful as him being on the screen and doing stuff because he was quite a big name and it would have been awfully helpful, but there's no good complaining, and there's no good stopping. You can't just say, Oh, well, because he can't do that. We're going to either have to ditch this campaign, or we're going to have to delay it till whenever we can be bothered to delay it till. You've actually got to say, okay, what are we going to do instead? Keep the momentum going, because you probably during your planning quite a lot of momentum has happened and actually, we made quite a lot out of it because we'd actually sold this to the sales team and said to the sales team, tell all your customers that this is going to happen, get them to look forward to this, we thought, we're gonna have to tell the sales team that this isn't happening and so we actually had quite good fun with the sales team about how they could make it more exciting reading it than listening to it. So we did quite interesting campaigns about things like you know, we did lots of things about well, if you're blind or too busy, or it's dark, you might want to listen to it, that might be good. But actually, you can't come back, you might have lost the tape and listening again, it might be a bit you can't hear it properly, or your headphones have gone. But if you've got it, if you can read it, it's much better. So we did lots of thinking around that. So we had quite a lot of fun making what could have been an absolute catastrophe be quite fun and it worked rather well in the end and the author was very, very pleased, which was annoying, because he was so pleased with not having to perform, he then said, Oh, I never have to perform again do I? And you think oh bother!

Sam Birkett
So it's almost like, that's interesting, because that's sort of forcing you to improvise with other ideas, other avenues, isn't it? So it always makes me think of it in my mind's eye when water is trying to go down a set of channels and its blocked, therefore it has to find another way around, because thinking about it, I would almost say that every marketing campaign is imperfect, of course, because yeah, you never really get to everything you want to do exactly the way you want to do it. If you go to any marketing conference, I've got a real bugbear about this at the moment, but any marketing conferences or webinars, they always have the perfect campaign and they said, so this is what we have is our objective and we did this this this and then it all worked out. But you're seeing the edited highlights or how this amazing campaign works. So you feel a bit small and think, oh, gosh, I wish I could run campaigns that were so clear cut and beautifully delivered and exceeded their expectations by miles and all the stats are going the right direction. You think well, that's not realistic because of course the person presenting it gets to say this is amazing, but it's almost this... It's the finding compromise, isn't it? And what we quite often returned to, you know, you're working with other teams, and therefore you have to compromise on budget, on the time we have available, on what the sales team are looking to achieve, what you're looking to achieve. But it's almost that I suppose... if you've always got that flexibility in your planning approach in mind, then you've got experience to say, right, yeah, okay. We can't do... I don't know, the PPC, that's just a no-go. We are therefore going to have to do this to compensate, try something else. But I think personally, an important thing is this is, as you say, when you're contributing, you're trying to come to an agreement about how you can use them best. But then if you... either they force you to innovate, to try the stuff. But also, you can do the whole thing of well, raising caveats and saying, well, we're not going to do this. But that will mean potentially X, Y, and Z. So...

Sally Green
Exactly, you have to get everybody but you also get all your stakeholders to recognise that every compromise has ramifications for all of you. It's not, you know, just because the salespeople said no, we've got to have it on the third of September, because that's when we're doing the launch. Well, if the contributor can't be there on the third of September, it's no good just saying oh well, that means we can't do it, you have to turn around and say, that might be one little problem, but it has ramifications all the way through your campaign, which will mean that your sales figures are going to be wrong at the end of the month, etc, etc. You all have to change and so everybody's got to compromise, not just marketing, and it can sometimes end up well, because we can't do that, oh, marketing, fix it!

Sam Birkett
Yes and that's it, isn't it? Because it's quite easy in a way when, again, marketing quite visible, and you go, oh, well, this isn't working, it has to be your fault. So it comes back up the line, doesn't it and you're having to go oh no no no, hang on a minute. If we set up in the beginning of good tracking and understanding, because that's the thing I quote provided lots of campaigns I'm working on it's like, you know, lead generation and conversions and so, in the past, I've had times when people have gone, well, this isn't working, and it must be marketing's fault, because you're the ones who are communicating the message. Why is it not working? And even if you said, well, we've had to make compromises and we haven't had to do it the way we wanted to, because of X, Y and Z. They can still pass this blame up and you go well, no, actually, if we'd set up in the first place, a good system to understand all of the gate posts or hurdles that people need to go through to get to the end goal, we can then diagnose and say, well, no, this is where the problem is. So it wasn't the problem actually, that we couldn't do PPC, that doesn't matter. We're getting people through this channel and that's good. But they're not converting here because of something else. But it's diagnosing isn't it?

Sally Green
Yeah, and some of it might be without your control. There's nothing to say that you should know this, but it's not impossible. But halfway through your campaign, a huge competition arrives. So you're marketing your great sports car and halfway through it secretly, Maserati has just put out a new version of their absolutely top seller and it's quite a small audience, and particularly if you've got a small audience that can afford and want to buy this kind of thing. If a competition suddenly appears halfway through your campaign, you could be up the doo-doo really. That's not in your control and you have to be able to... *gulp* say, Oh, dear, what shall we do now? And yes, you could turn around and just be incredibly rude about Maseratis. But that doesn't give your brand very much kudos. But you have to have a way, you have to think around these things. I'm going to use that horrible cliche, but it is about thinking outside the box, you've then got to really think, we've now got to do something very other here, because we've started this campaign. So people have begun to hear us and what we can't do is either just stop, because there's nothing going on and where have they gone? Or be rude. So you now have got to do some big outside-the-box thinking.

Sam Birkett
That's interesting as well, actually, because I was thinking, I don't know, were we discussing this the other day? We said about perhaps back in the day marketing campaigns where you know, you had got a direct mailer or something, you'd already buried a lot of costs and you were doing, you press the button, and it's going, the machine was on and it's very hard to stop, it will turn around and flex it. Whereas nowadays, and I've got a live example, where we've sorted the landing page for a campaign, and it's like, we were saying yesterday, well, if this is wrong, or that's not quite right, or the clients are quite happy with that, we can just change it. We can just tweak and do this and that and that and then we can add to it, we can have multiple phases and so there's much more flexibility these days to change tack. But it's that, as you say, again, it's sort of that you have to have that awareness that there will be things outside of your control, which will happen. So it's almost that with your planning, right, the beginning again, the flexibility and sort of, we can't do this the way we want to necessarily or we can and then everything looks rosy and you go Oh, but actually no, no, that suddenly is you say something else has come up out of the blue and you go ooh! So we need to flex, we need to change, therefore we've been forced to be imperfect, but we might end up with something better than was envisioned in the initial plan.

Sally Green
Absolutely, you also have to remember that your audience isn't necessarily completely static. So you've spent some time beginning, one of the things you should have been done in your marketing plan is identifying the audience, probably got several personas there that you're writing on messaging for. But there's nothing to say that that is an absolutely static thing and you might find that during the campaign, yes, you all thought the actual it was all about Margot, who was very middle class and had a cockapoo, and you're sending them some kind of dog food and so that was your persona. But you might find that suddenly, an influencer has come on screen and said, God, I tried this, and it was absolutely brilliant, my dog loves it, I'm never going to use another dog food now that this very famous person, your audience has changed because now you want to start talking to that celebrity's fan base, who may well not be Margot. So you do have to keep a really close eye on your audience. You can't just think, Oh, I've cracked it now, all the personas are here, off we go.

Sam Birkett
Yeah, there's a little diagram I've been using in some training stuff recently, which is just a very simple swirly arrow thing going clockwise, of course, which is learn, do, measure, understand. There's that real mantra, I'm trying to get across to people, I think I was talking about, you know, like your own profile and how you put yourself forward and in this example, yeah, whatever you're doing, doing the stuff, and then under measuring its effectiveness, then learning about understanding why it's done, what it's done learning, and then implementing changes, you know, to it. So important, but I mean, again, if you sort of if you almost have this perception that every campaign, every single thing you do is going to be imperfect, either through, right at the beginning, you're just not gonna have the resources you need for it. Or you're going to accept the fact that things will change, and that your hypotheses at the beginning are going to be confused or terribly scientific. I just saw my mind's eye, my lab at school when I was...

Sally Green
With your Bunsen burner

Sam Birkett
With a Bunsen burner and yeah, so seeing all of that, and thinking, Oh, my goodness, that's just the hypotheses and having to write out these things. But that's the scientific way, isn't it? Again, that whole thing of, well, let's understand why it's working, why it's not working and accepting the fact that there are factors out there, which some unknown, some are unknown, which will impact upon this plan we do and I suppose you could say that for any sort of short term campaign, or any long term strategy as well. So it's not a whole 12-month or five-year strategy. I went to a meeting the other day where so it wasn't purely marketing, this was like, business performance, was being assessed by a company and all of those times I've been in one of those presentations, where they've looked at, well, this was our three-year or five-year plan. This is what's happened. It pretty much never ever relates to the plan with what happens and so... but then there's the factors of why those things changed, what we could potentially can learn from that and how you can kind of mitigate and improvise and change. So again, I think, perhaps there's this sort of acceptance that when you're, not always saying, Well, we're going to say, this is our plan now, but hey, it's going to completely change, it may completely change, it may change a little bit, but you almost always have to be ready don't you I think, to change.

Sally Green
I mean, that's a really good point. The strategic influencers are your internal strategic influence, like your marketing strategy, your sales strategy, and your overall business plan. You're right, that can force marketing plans to be imperfect. Because if you're looking a long way ahead, to... say one of your marketing strategies is to... you want to be the market leader in Sudan, within six years, then you are probably going to have to run some imperfect marketing strategies because at the moment, you're nowhere in Sudan, and Sudan doesn't even know the name of your brand. So you're going to have to run some campaigns that just don't work. Because nobody knows who you are. But you're dropping raindrops into the pool of Sudan, hoping that they will reverberate outwards, to make you the market leader. So in a way, sometimes you have to do imperfect marketing because that's what the strategy needs. So sometimes it's useful to actually accept that imperfection might be the right thing to do.

Sam Birkett
Yeah, that's interesting. That reminds me of in the past when I've been looking at, you know, getting too much to budgets now aren't we.

Sally Green
Budgets are always important, you know what I'm like!

Sam Birkett
Exactly, we've got to keep the budgeting in there! And I think specifically, there was a sort of almost the 80/20 rule I had about, you know, 80% of the budget is spent on stuff that we know we got a high degree of confidence that it's going to work in the areas where we need it to work, and 20% is testing, or you know, just stuff that some of it will stick, some of it will fail, you know, and accepting the fact that it's going to fail. Or some of it will fail. Or maybe not. Maybe it's all amazing and you do really well. But having that setup is important, isn't it? I mean, particularly when, who knows, I mean, the country seems to be in a recession and perhaps heading for Well, definitely heading for choppy waters, it seems. So a number of businesses out there are probably going, Oh, well, let's be careful, let's not risk, let's focus back on our core stuff we know works well. But of course, if you do that for too long, you end up perhaps becoming too rigid and too focused on those areas and therefore, in the longer term, you're never trying things you're losing a bit innovative spirit, it becomes less exciting for people working there as well.

Sally Green
That's a very good point.

Sam Birkett
It gradually erodes, doesn't it? So...

Sally Green
It also will stop working. I mean, although yes, the combustion engine has been working for years, and it really hasn't ever stopped. But marketing plans, you can't just repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. But there's a very famous person who's said doing things twice and expecting the same results is an act of madness.

Sam Birkett
People say Einstein. Yeah.

Sally Green
But it's almost like that, because you can't just think, Oh, we did it like that last year, we'll do it again. No problem, because that assumes that your marketplace never changes and we all know that isn't true.

Sam Birkett
Yeah, I mean, well, that's it again, isn't it? It comes down to and if you know, if you're doing the tracking and the metrics well, you should be able to identify and say, Okay, well, this is perhaps diminishing returns on this channel, or perhaps, you know, perhaps it's going the other way and you're thinking, well, we don't do enough here, actually, but because we're so rigid in you know, we spent 30% of our budget on this, and we spent 30% on that and we never do this bit here. If you do that for too long, you're probably going to end up in trouble, aren't you? So you need to have that innovative, not just a spirit, but a plan, unlimited plan and usage of your budget to focus on those areas where yeah, you can do more, haven't you? I mean, because otherwise, you're just going to drown.

Sally Green
This is the one thing that mean shows that agile marketing really... it matters that you do it, because you need to be able to change quite quickly, depending on your metrics. So you need to look A) them all the time and B) not just look at them and go, Oh, I'll put that in a report at the end of the month, look at them and think, Oh, hang on a minute, I need to change something here and I think that's sometimes something which bigger companies lose sight of, because you have planned everything and it's all been planned and then at the end of the month, you do a report and that's all fine and dandy. But actually, you should have done something two weeks ago, not now. I mean, although agile, there's a lot of... you know, you can be a professionally agile marketing thing and that's quite a complicated thing to do and I don't wanna say it's wrong, but it's maybe not right for everybody. But at the same time, I'm going to now say two things that are contradictory. One is you've got to think all the time and be able to change on a six-pence. However, at the same time, it is always useful to do, at the end of the campaign, when the campaign ends, do a report about it. This is what we learned. This is what we changed. This is how much money we wasted because I just don't believe people that say we didn't spend waste a single penny of time or energy or money in our marketing campaigns. That's just not true. But write it down and learn from it, and actually share that report. So make sure that not just your boss knows what the result of the campaign is, but share it with your other team members because they're probably doing exactly the same thing and maybe it'd be useful for them to see how your last campaign went, because then they... don't say, Oh, yes, it was a disaster, but they will then learn from your imperfections.

Sam Birkett
Yeah. I think that's a fantastic top tip. I should have like a bell ringer and I think something you may have said previously, but it's so important, the whole so we did this and perhaps yes, it was what we were classed as imperfect campaign, or a perfect campaign what, you know, worked really well. What didn't work well? Whatever happened, what can we see there? Why did it perform well? Why did it not perform well? And then what is it that we can then go? Okay, well, yeah, this is what we can learn from the future, again, it's that circle isn't it.

Sally Green
That's exactly right, and while it's useful doing things in an agile manner, while still doing it, so changing everything for five seconds, at the same time, sometimes you need to take a little bit of a step back from the campaign when it's finished. Take a deep breath, and think, Okay, now I'm going to write down how that campaign went, because you need to not be inside it to judge it.

Sam Birkett
It's almost like I think maybe people must need like your famous one-page marketing plan, which I've made use of many a time and still doing to this very day. It's almost a sort of a debrief or something with like, sets of four or five questions and say so yeah, well did it stick to budget? Did it deliver on goals? Those kinds of things, and even the sort of what I would term the soft kind of stuff around the outside, which is more about how well were you able to implement this within the team or other teams? Yeah, like picking up the comms thing saying, Well, this went really well. But it could have gone even better had we spoken to these people two weeks earlier and it's usually the case with all these things that people have not been informed of what your plan was earlier or they didn't really understand what you were trying to achieve, or vice versa and so it's usually those kind of human factors aren't there that do that.

Sally Green
People often forget that is very, very easy not to put into your marketing plan, internal comms. It's usually the thing that nobody ever thinks about until sales come in and go. You're doing what? Why has this gone out? And then you think, ooh...

Sam Birkett
Why did I do that? Why did they not do that?

Sally Green
Why did I not tell them?

Sam Birkett
Yeah, and again, because that's what we always come back to is... already come back to is that is that people are not understanding what you were trying to achieve? The communications are broken down, basically. So you think, well, there's so many things we can learn from it from a practical standpoint and, you know, or I don't know, we use this video editing software to achieve this and it was done in-house, but it took twice as long and the opportunity cost of you know, so and so the marketing exec working on it was wasted. So we could invest the budget on you know, these external guys doing it and half the time and also, me as the project manager did not include an earlier phase, you know, these guys to sign off on this stuff, which they have to sign off on and so on, and so on, so forth. So you can have, I don't wanna make it complicated. I think it's a one-page debrief, isn't it, like a campaign debrief, but there's sort of a practical debrief guide, isn't it to then say, right, well, yeah. These are the reasons why if you start with the idea that all campaigns are imperfect, and then you say, well, these are the reasons why it went wrong. But these are things we can improve on the future and I think you almost have to accept that. It's very rarely gonna be the case that you'll come to that debrief and say, yep, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, it was all absolutely fine, wasn't it? But if you look back on that, as a manager, or as a marketing director, if you do that with, you know, multiple marketing teams, that's a great way of assessing your performance.

Sally Green
Absolutely brilliant. Yeah and helping your teams work with each other. It breaks down quite a lot of silos if you actually do a debrief and say, this is what happened, this is what we thought was useful and you might not actually go to operations and say, Can we have a quick rethink about the last six months worth of campaigns? What worked? What didn't work? What was what were you happy with? Because then you'll never going to be perfect. But as you said, you'll become increasingly less perfect. In fact, you shouldn't be perfect, because that will make life so dull. Imagine if you just then had a template of the perfect campaign, you'd have to do this all the time!

Sam Birkett
Just roll this out and it will happen. Although some would argue about the whole kind of, we're heading towards this AI and robots kind of doing... I'm not gonna go onto hobbyhorse about that I think. But even then, in any scenarios, we always say the fact that this always ultimately comes down to a human being making a decision to do something somewhere, on behalf of another human being, that will always have those lessons to learn within it. But I mean, I'm sure there are teams who will have some sorts of, you know, mechanisms for debriefing and things, but perhaps, you know, sometimes that's a meeting, and perhaps you have a bit of a talking shop, you don't really take away lessons. But if you have a form, which is like set of questions to get these things out of everyone involved, and then have like three things we can do the future, and one to maybe do this again, do that, again, don't do this bit differently. Again, you know, so...

Sally Green
It's also really important that doesn't become a blame shop.

Sam Birkett
Yeah, absolutely.

Sally Green
Actually, any campaign that fails, unless it's a blind and someone's done something stupendously wrong, and it is actually, you can point a finger, but by and large campaigns fail, or don't succeed as well as they should, because everything hasn't quite gone right. Everything's been a bit... all the communications have been a bit fuzzy, rather than black and white wrong, everything's been a bit late or a bit early, or the websites, almost landing papers, almost rather not quite and there's no blame there. It's because people don't have time. They don't have energy, the right person. But it's also some of its subjective. The fact that you didn't like it marketing director doesn't mean that it was wrong and you do have to be were against that. I don't like it. It's not right, it's a dangerous thing to say.

Sam Birkett
Thanks very much, everyone, for listening. That's the end of part one of our imperfect marketing campaigns episode and we hope you found it useful. In part two, we'll be going into even more details and hopefully some useful tips about diagnosing why campaigns go wrong and things you can do to help learn from imperfect marketing campaigns out there. So come back next time. Bye for now.