Just like a toxic ex, some marketing bad habits drag you down. The only way to move forward is to cut them loose and learn from your mistakes. After all, it’s not like you and your bad habits never belonged together, it’s just that you grew apart as people.

So start enjoying a life untethered by regret by breaking up with the following marketing mistakes:

Shooting First, Asking Questions Later With Big Campaign Rollouts

We know you are excited about your next big campaign, but that should mean that you want to do it justice by getting it right. Otherwise, you could be spending a huge chunk of your budget on a marketing blitz that falls on deaf ears. Or, worse, your campaign turns out to be a success that your other company resources cannot keep up with.

Avoid wasting money or putting your company in crisis mode by first measuring your situation before designing any campaigns in earnest. Take stock of your current company resources — including marketing resources, like your number of active social media followers, as well as company resources, like what your order turnaround time would be like if your business increased by 200 percent.

As you assess the lay of the land, you can then start determining which people your campaign should target most emphatically. The difference in fine-tuned audience targeting can translate to huge differences in your eventual return on investment.

Similarly, having resources set up in advance of a new campaign can make the campaign more successful. For instance, why have a new social media push to encourage site visits if your site is outdated and not optimized to capture leads effectively? Consider your campaign from a 10,000-mile high view to have everything in place for success once your campaign does roll out.

Obsessing Over “Getting It Right” With Marketing Campaigns

On the flip side of the above problem, some people take forever to pull the trigger when it comes to releasing the results of their hard work to the public. You can spend weeks or months trying to “get it perfect,” only to release something and still realize you made a critical mistake.

The best way to avoid interminable delays while still minimizing campaign oversights is to take an “agile project management” approach to your campaigns. Under an agile project cycle, you build a demo version of your final product that performs one function well. With this proof-of-concept out of the way, you can add more features and refine the performance of the product in a second version. The cycle repeats until an acceptable “build” is created and released to the public. This iterative process allows you to quickly produce results, get mistakes out of the way, and refine your eventual performance capabilities.

As an out-of-the-box example of agile development, just look at how much the cartoon cat Garfield changed over the years as cartoonist Jim Davis refined his design from 1978 to now. This change did not happen overnight, but as the result of the rough product making gradual changes to become the one we see now.

With marketing, you can take an agile approach by testing your campaigns with small, hyper-targeted audiences before releasing a more global campaign. By using limited-participant trial runs and A/B testing, you can optimize your campaign to gradually make it “perfect” before most of the public sees the final results.

Not Using “Release, Measure, Adjust, Repeat” Cycles

Another feature of an agile approach is that the work is never truly done. Just like how modern software receives patches on an ongoing basis, your campaigns strategies are never truly complete since you will be optimizing them over time.

These optimizations come in response to campaign performance analytics. As you measure the response to your campaign, you can make small adjustments to reach closer to your expected goals. For instance, a new social media campaign can learn that posting just before 5 p.m. earns more views than waiting until after five to publish.

You may also discover unexpected results to your campaign, such as a surge in inquiries for a profitable side service that currently only makes up a small portion of your business.

In this way, marketing campaigns are a dynamic, adaptable creature that responds reflexively to its changing environment.

Ensure that your campaigns can always live up to their fullest potential — and that you aren’t letting marketing bad habits hold you back — by getting marketing automation consulting and other support in advance of your next digital marketing campaign.

Contact Vonazon now to get started shedding bad habits like ugly exes today.