Have you ever had a marketing promotional activity go bad? Maybe you tried a new sponsorship or a give-away and the results have existing customer’s upset or potential customers annoyed. What do you do?
[tweetthis]Failure in marketing activities can be a path toward future success.[/tweetthis]
You can evaluate what went wrong and identify the root cause. But sometimes, you can hear feedback that just serves to confuse you and your team. How can you move forward and learn?
Post Mortems allow a team to judge results against expectations. Did you achieve the number of attendees at your event, where they the right audience, did they stay engaged, etc. But who is doing the post mortem with you? Is it just marketing or does it include a range of stakeholders.
The big question
I like to ask one simple and direct question after a marketing activity.
If you could go back in time, what would
you do differently based on what happened?
It helps to get a range of viewpoints that help you identify what exactly backfired? Was the activity off-brand, did you end up attracting too few attendees, was the tone too commercial? You want a full view of why others perceive the activity as a backfire. And often, it is one main issue not several.
A Real World Example
A small business owner from the mid-west connected with me a few weekends ago and wanted to pick my brain. His company sponsored an event and they spent a lot of money and the team was disappointed. He wanted to understand how he could avoid the problems he experienced.
There were several lessons from this consultation that I can share:
WHAT WAS YOUR PLAN TO MEASURE SUCCESS? The team never defined success upfront. What would it look like if this went well? Without asking that question, there were several ideas of what it would look like if they won.
WHO WAS IN CHARGE? Three different departments were involved in the event but there wasn’t a single point person. This caused an issue where everyone assumed someone else was handling a key activity. So a leaderless event is destined to have issues. Every marketing activity needs an owner.
DID YOU PLAN FOR WHAT COULD GO WRONG? It turned out that the event was held in an average venue but the company’s brand was more upscale. This disconnect could have easily been avoided by someone scope out the space before committing to participating.
DID YOU PLAN TO MAKE INFORMATION ABOUT THE EVENT SHAREABLE? What did you as a sponsor do to encourage sharing on social media or through other channels? Did you think through ahead how to achieve the goal of bringing in new potential customers by offering something of value if your current customers brought a guest? Did you even have a plan around spreading the word?
DID YOU SPEAK TO SOMEONE WHO SPONSORED IN THE PAST? Sound obvious but there is so much to learn from a short call to someone who participated in an event the prior year. Why not ask the organizer for at least 2 references of people who sponsored in the past and came back again this year. If the organizing group doesn’t have anyone who can serve as a reference, that’s a clear signal that the event may have issues retaining support. Your sponsorship might be filling their leaky bucket.
Learning from our mistakes
Backfires are going to happen. Events will get screwed up and people will be disappointed. But what you do to fix that issue the next time around is what managing is all about. Don’t be afraid to take a risk, but make sure you have internally alignment about what success looks like.
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