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| Image Source: forbes.com |
Winston Churchill famously said about the former German Empire, “They are constantly snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.” This is a good phrase for marketing mavens and PR princes to remember. Even the best-laid plans of advertising agencies and online marketers gang aft agley, (often go wrong) as Scots put it.
While there is no fool-proof way to guarantee a stunning success for every single marketing campaign, there are ways and means of ensuring that, no matter what the initial outcome may be — you can confidently haul your butt out of the bear trap before it springs shut and you and your company/brand are left without a leg to stand on or a tuchas to sit on for that matter.
We’ll use the analogy of a computer virus, or bug that begins to destroy the health of your cherished PC. What do you do when such a cyber creature gets into your hard drive?
According to Ahmit Mehta at PC Health Boost, “when a bad bug hits your PC you’ll want an expert to come in and fix registry errors, file association and font entries, among other things.”
Since many people are actually emotionally tied to their PCs, it’s not a good idea for them to work on fixing it themselves, unless they’ve been technically trained to do so. I say that from experience as one who tried to fix his own beloved PC.
And just as an infected PC needs professional care, so too can your dead-in-the-water advertising and/or marketing campaign can benefit from the disinterested perspective of a third party review.
If your company/brand has spent tens of thousands of dollars on an online advertising campaign , and the results have not resulted in much traffic or the conversion of traffic into paying customers, you are in deep trouble, my friend, and you will soon know it, either by the statistics you are forced to look at, or by the ferocious baying for blood of your boss.
Not often I get to use gang aft agley, tuchas and baying in the same article.
But I digress.
No matter how you discover the disaster, your next step as a marketing, advertising and publicity professional is to stop the hemorrhaging and find a way to salvage the company’s investment. As in the eradication of a computer virus, don’t play the blame game; at this point, with the money swirling around the toilet bowl ready to sink and be lost forever, it isn’t important to point fingers; what is important is to calmly and quickly make lemonade out of the sour citrus that you’ve been handed.
Go back and look at your strategy for this particular campaign — assuming you had one of course.
In their article from this past November 7 Reasons Why Your Online Marketing Is Failing, SEO firm Dejan SEO lays out some of the reasons your online campaign is not performing up to expectations. Among the 7 reasons they list include:
- You Let SEO Overshadow Quality Content
- “Don’t forgo your creativity entirely for the sake of your obsession with keywords.”
- Your Marketing Teams Do Not Collaborate
- “Online marketing demands that there is constant interaction between different teams and departments, such as SEO, PR and Marketing.” You are not alone
Many of the best and brightest in the PR/Marketing game have had to face disasters, and have been able to land on their feet, like a cat. For example Mervyn LeRoy, a famous Hollywood publicity director, was tasked with the seemingly impossible job of turning Jane Russell’s first big-budget movie “The Outlaw” into a family-friendly film because the studio was going bankrupt trying to sell it as a sexy western, which is what it was (and still is).
But this was back in 1943, when moral standards were a little higher than they are today.
Movie theaters were pulling the film and sending it back to the studio, saying “thanks, but no thanks – send us something the whole family can watch, not this smut.” LeRoy pruned some of the most egregious scenes from the film and then repackaged it as a morality play, where the bad girl (Russell) gets her just desserts and the good girl (Mimi Aguglia) is rewarded for her virtue. Marketed THAT way, the film became a blockbuster and saved the studio’s hide.
So the next time you’re faced with a marketing melt-down, just remember your PC and/or Jane Russell, and the servicing it takes to pull the rabbit of success out of the hat of disaster.
John Bohan is currently the general manager of SocialTyze, an Internet firm that helps brands empower their consumers by providing in-depth information. To know more about his expertise, visit this Facebook page.
