When starting a business, you tend to think every prospect is a potential customer. Over time though, you realize that is a terrible way to run a business! Identifying your ideal customers and marketing directly to them allows you to focus on better serving your client base and saves a ton of money in wasted advertising investments. The top reasons advertising fails are outlined below. The first reason is the old adage, “Marketing to everyone is marketing to no one.”
4 Common Reasons Advertising Fails
1. Advertising to the wrong audience.
Want to reach young Millennials? Don’t advertise on broadcast television unless it’s live sports. Want to reach retired Boomers? Don’t buy Tik Tok ads. Those examples are obvious, but there are many harder questions, like how do I advertise to educated moms with children in the home with household incomes greater than $150k?
Having a Media Buyer professional manage your advertising investments ensure you don’t make demographic targeting mistakes.
2. Not resonating with your audience.
If your message doesn’t resonate with your target audience, it will not work. That is common sense, but common sense is not so common.
By investing time in getting to know and understand your demographic, you’ll be better equipped to speak their language. Focus groups, talking to your customers, and immersing yourselves in the demographic will pay dividends when you’re working on your messaging. Authenticity and a great call to action are what we’ve seen be most compelling and successful.
3. Unrealistic advertising budgets always fail.
If we had a dollar for every time we watched a marketer spend a fortune on creative and skimp on the media buy…
Creative assets are important. But, spending so much on your creative that you don’t have any ad budget left over to show off the creative is a rookie move!
An underfunded media budget is a guaranteed strategy for failure. So is spreading your ad budget too thin by trying to advertise in too many places without enough Frequency.
Our favorite quote is, “Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark, you know what you’re doing, but no one else does.” The same can be said about expensive creative that never sees the light of day because the marketing budget is blown by the beautiful ad that sits in your Dropbox folder.
4. Poor follow-through and bad campaign tracking.
We may be able to deliver leads to a business through strategically invested advertising, but if the receptionist answering the phone is unfriendly or unresponsive, the advertising was a waste.
You’ll also have wasted ad dollars if the web contact form gets filled out and no one follows up with that lead.
At Thrive, our team provides regular advertising metrics that track your campaign performances. If you see Conversions on your website but the sales aren’t closing, it’s time to discuss the internal follow-through in your business. In an inpatient society, consumers demand quick responses, or they will find a competitor who returns their inquiry.
Do you need an experienced team to invest your advertising budget for you? That’s what we do! You need a media buyer. We work with your existing paid advertising budget to get you more for your investment. Call us today to chat about how we can work together.