08/03/2021
The old story goes that your advertising works 50% of the time. The trick is knowing which 50%.
Sometimes campaigns fail. There’s an argument that campaigns never die because there’s always some exposure, but unreasonable rationalizations aside—campaigns fail.
The reasons are varied. It could be the message; it could be the strategy or the media placement; it could be the choice of medium or a thousand other reasons. If you have access to good research, now’s the time for a post-mortem. If not, you have to look at the freely available analytics, but those usually skew in favor of the medium providing them.
I like to talk to customers, the general public, and salespeople in the trenches.
If you can tweak it, fine, but if not, toss it in the bin and start anew. Of course, whenever you try something different, there’s the loss of audience; you should always give a campaign time. But if 6-9 months have passed, and you’ve tweaked the messaging, then maybe it’s time to make a radical change.
I’ve seen businesses thrive with a traditional media campaign when their competitors are advertising digitally, and I’ve seen companies go nearly bankrupt when they walk away from a winning content marketing strategy. It doesn’t matter if it worked for other businesses. Does it work for you? You could be an outlier.
Stop wasting time and money beating a dead horse. Don’t be afraid to walk away from a losing advertising strategy or campaign.
