This post may contain affiliate links, allowing us to earn a commission on the products we would recommend to our families and closest friends. You can find more info on our Legal Stuff page.

Marketing can be a tricky thing to get right. It’s essential if you want your business to grow, but it’s also something that you need to really work hard on if it’s going to make an impact – half-hearted marketing or marketing without any thought behind it will just be a waste of time and money. 

However, even with some hard thinking and some good planning, marketing campaigns don’t always do what you want them to do, and that’s something all business owners will need to avoid if possible. So with that in mind, here are some tips to make sure your next marketing campaign actually works. 

Have A Goal

One of the reasons why some marketing campaigns don’t work is that the business owner doesn’t have a goal to work towards. When there’s no goal, it’s hard to make good choices, and it’s easy to take the wrong path because there are no signposts to let you know you’re going in the wrong direction – there isn’t a final destination to get to, so how can you know which path to take? 

When you have an end goal to work towards, your marketing decisions will be much better, and you’ll be more likely to get the results you wanted. Not only that, but you’ll be able to see a lot sooner whether or not the campaign is working because you’ll know what results you were meant to be looking for and whether you’re seeing them – if not, you can make changes quickly to ensure a better outcome. 

Know Who Your Audience Is 

Another reason why some marketing campaigns don’t do their job is that they’re far too general. It’s easy to assume that your product or service is something that everyone is going to want or even need, but that’s very rarely the case, and it could be that by marketing to everyone, you’re missing out on marketing directly to the people who are most likely to want what you’re selling. 

The best thing to do is to carry out proper market research to determine precisely who your target market is. These are the people you need to market to and create a campaign for, not the people who aren’t ever going to be interested in your products and services (even with the best campaign in the world, if they don’t want what you’re selling, they’re not going to buy). 

Market research takes time, and there are lots of things you need to understand, such as tribetailing vs niche retailing so don’t rush – take your time, and the results will speak for themselves. 

Use More Than One Channel 

Although your market research is mainly going to help you understand your customers and the kind of advertising they’ll respond to, it can also help when it comes to seeing where you can place your ads. Ideally, you’ll want to use more than one channel, spreading the word further as you do. 

Of course, you don’t want to pick randomly, which is where market research comes in yet again. Look at where your market spends their time and what they do and use that information to work out where to put your ads. It could be online on social media platforms, it could be TV, it might be the commute to work where they look at billboards from a train window… knowing this helps your marketing budget and gives you the best results.