The Top Ten Tips on How to Squander your Marketing Budget:
(What follows is the wreckage we’ve witnessed from other ad agencies’ failed campaigns over the years. For example, those wonderful creative spots that you never forget but you can’t remember the product name and never would buy it in a million years. Just because an idea is edgy and creative doesn’t mean it’ll bring in any return on investment to the client. Some ad agencies just want to win awards. An effective marketing plan starts with market research data collection…REAL market research where we actually talk to the target audience, not just facts gathered off the internet.)
So here we go. Let’s roll the dice. The Top Ten Tips on how to squander your marketing budget:
Number 10 - Don’t define your target audience at the beginning of the project.
Number 9 - Don’t define metrics to measure the success of your marketing campaign.
Number 8 - Don’t survey your target audience to find out what they want, how they talk, what moves them, what turns them off i.e. what problem they’re interested in solving that you may have the answer to.
Number 7 - Hire a “cool” ad agency who “knows everything” (but doesn’t actually know your target audience.)
Number 6 - Go with their “cool creative” without testing it on focus group of your target audience.
Number 5 - Let the head of marketing pick the actors to be used instead of test marketing a range of actors.
Number 4 - Make only one commercial. Don’t test a range of commercials coming from different “personnas*” to see which one moves most of the target audience to do what you want.
Number 3 - Don’t test the top commercial with various demographics.
Number 2 - Hire a production company you can blame if the creative concept fails.
Number 1 - Make a commercial that will win awards to advance your career.
* “persona – A “beingness” for the commercial, i.e. businesslike, or “out-of-the-box”. For example compare how The Good Hands People sell car insurance versus Geiko or Progressive. Different personas work with different audiences.
There’s a road to marketing success. While that road isn’t paved with the tips above, we hope they’ll at least be the warning signs to watch out for along the way. Read my counterpart article to find out how to take off the marketing blindfold and blow the top off your marketing efforts.
- See more at: http://blog.theassociation.tv/blog/the-association/page/3#sthash.icERYS6E.dpuf