In the marketing world, failure is often celebrated. When launching new campaigns or exploring new strategies, it’s healthy to take a few wrong turns. By figuring out what doesn’t work, we’re better able to discover what does.
But as much as marketers celebrate failure, the last thing we want is to lose a chunk of money or waste our time chasing a direction that won’t work for our businesses.
So how do we strike the right balance? How do we limit our failures and lessons learned and focus on the opportunities that will make our businesses more successful in the long run?
We need to take time out of our busy schedules to make sure our plans are well aligned with the market.
The answer to this question is more straightforward than we sometimes realize. Rather than throwing darts in the dark and starting from scratch with every new marketing campaign, we need to learn from the experiences of our fellow marketers.
Here are three of the biggest traps marketers should avoid:
Mistake #1: Getting Stuck in Our Marketer Bubbles
It’s easy for marketers to get stuck in the acquisition, growth, retention bubble. But are the decisions we’re making in the best interests of our customers?
We need to take time out of our busy schedules to make sure our plans are well aligned with the market. By talking to our target audience regularly, we’ll have a better sense of the words we should be using, the concepts we should be covering, and the pain points our audiences are facing.
Here’s a quick hack to help you get out of your marketing bubble: each week, reserve two or three hours to conduct customer conversations. Plan a few calls to ask about your customers’ upcoming needs and priorities, or—better yet—take them out to lunch or dinner.
Related Content: How We Screwed Up a Brilliant Marketing Campaign
Mistake #2: Wasting Time on Admin
From project management to uploading blog posts to WordPress, it’s easy for marketers to get bogged down with tasks that are important but distracting.
We need to be hyper-focused on growth: running experiments for new campaigns, launching a blog, coming up with content ideas.
Unfortunately, many of us are stuck doing tasks that are more tedious. At the end of the day, the piles of work we have left leave us tired and our creative energy feeling zapped.
Fortunately, there’s a solution: hire a virtual assistant. Work with this person to offload regular admin tasks so you can focus on growing your marketing campaigns. Make the case to your boss by showing exactly where your time is going and what you could accomplish if you had that time to focus on your strategic goal.
Mistake #3: Involving Too Many Cooks
When it comes to building your marketing strategy, every single person on your team is going to have an opinion.
If you’re not careful about whom you involve with your internal projects, you’ll risk bogging down your team with indecision. While team input is important, feedback sessions shouldn’t keep your campaigns from launching.
All perspectives are valid, so make sure to incorporate them into your planning—but don’t hold back your current campaigns. Instead, focus on the future.
What all these mistakes have in common is that we all make them—seriously, every marketer makes them. Inefficiencies can creep up. Keep your eyes peeled, and actively course-correct before you’ve even made the mistake in the first place.