CMOs and their marketing teams utilize numerous resources and talent to ensure their campaigns perform well. But thorough preparation is just half the story: CMOs often struggle to drive the execution successfully, resulting in lesser impact and weaker ROI. With resources and strategic value at stake, avoiding common pitfalls while designing campaign models would go a long way in maximizing returns down the road.
From discussions with top CMOs and marketing executives, SBI has uncovered valuable insights from their campaign design process, and we have identified four common pitfalls that many CMOs often encounter, and how they can navigate around them.
1. Your buyer journey does not include existing customers
When most marketing teams start building campaigns, one of the very first components is the target’s position in the buyer journey. Unfortunately, many campaigns were developed with only new customers in mind. Customer marketing has immense revenue potential, and not including existing customers in the campaign model means missing out on this potential.
Marketing plays a critical role in getting prospects and customers back in the funnel, so CMOs should start including existing customers into their campaign design. Furthermore, marketing leaders can consider capturing cross/upsell opportunities with their campaigns, leveraging one initiative to amplify the impact on both new and existing customers and maximizing potential ROI.
2. You don’t include sales in your campaigns
There’s nothing more frustrating for a sales rep than getting blindsided by an unexpected marketing initiative. More crucially, it severely damages the trust built between the company and customers, and between marketing and sales. Both functions are essential components of an efficient revenue engine, hence any dysfunction between them can result in lost opportunities for revenue capture and slower pipelines.
To enable a symbiotic relationship between sales and marketing, CMOs need to take charge of establishing partnerships with key sales leaders, such as the CRO. Start every campaign by looping in sales with the planning team and focus on coordinating opportunities where sales can leverage campaigns to help move customers down pipelines. The potential returns are immense: sales gets to capture more qualified leads, and marketing can see more positive returns on their investments, a perfect win-win relationship.
3. You focus most campaigns on short-term goals
Marketing is no stranger to tight deadlines and moving targets, and CMOs often make the mistake of prioritizing these over capturing returns. While short-term goals seem urgent and often promise quick wins, the real dividends that marketing creates are often seen in the long run. The trouble is: how can marketing leaders justify their investments and initiatives to other leaders now?
The trick to navigating this question starts with goal setting. Before launching any campaigns, CMOs should consider corporate revenue goals and how they can align marketing’s plans to create the next best move. By demonstrating how marketing is contributing to the company's bottom line, CMOs can justify their long-term goals and create more time for their campaigns to bear fruit, avoiding the pitfall of needing to meet the expectations set by other functions.
4. You rush campaigns out just to meet schedules and deadlines
While marketing does their best to deliver high-quality messaging in a timely manner, the truth is that no customer is eagerly waiting for their newsletter. But posting schedules still dominate the planning headspace of CMOs, who remain concerned about the quantity and cadence of their messaging and believing that if they don’t meet an arbitrary frequency, customers will be less engaged.
Solving the quantity versus quality debate begins with understanding the desired result: what do you want to achieve with your messaging? Often, CMOs find their campaigns performing better if they just took more time to plan out goals and tactics, developing a clear image of what success would look like. Careful, strategic messaging can deliver much greater impact for marketing without incurring unnecessary costs in resources and labor, potentially leading to higher ROI down the line.
Have you faced other pitfalls in leading your marketing to success? Follow our blog for more insights into marketing best practices and how you can get ahead in 2024.
