Marketing Failure? Here’s What To Do With It
Perfectionism & Marketing Don’t Mix
This isn’t a post about marketing fails. We’re just straightup gonna talk failure. It’s inevitable, it’s valuable, and it won’t kill you. Making your peace with failure will make you a better business owner and a better marketer.
How to Handle It When Your Marketing Fails
#1 Get Objective: Was It Actually Failure?
#2 Get Kind: Remember Failure is Inevitable & Failure Is Necessary
#3 Get Creative: Freedom to Fail Leads To Greater Innovation
#4 Get Smart: What Did You Learn From the Failure?
#5 Get Proactive: What Will You Do Differently Next Time?
Look, getting marketing right is rarely an “on-the-first-try” sort of thing. From small startups to enterprise giants, marketers are constantly experimenting, gauging feedback, and evolving their marketing strategy, messaging, methods, and tactics.
There is no silver bullet, no class you can take, no best practice you can follow that will guarantee instantaneous, big wins. That’s because your audience is unique. Your business is unique. You’re going to have to hone your marketing until it works for you and your customers.
Marketing Mindset: The Thing We Don’t Talk About Enough
Marketing requires commitment and consistency. Consistency despite the lack of immediate validation. Consistency even though not all of your efforts will pay off and you’re going to have keep fine tuning your strategy. Consistency despite the fact that you’ll have to produce a lot of quality content for months before you’re likely to see a major return on investment.
Emotionally, this is quite a challenge. It requires most of us to majorly shift how we think about failure.
Because many business owners don’t realize the time, effort, and months of consistent, quality content required for successful marketing, many are quick to consider their website, blog, ads, or social media a failure- well before these channels have had a sufficient chance to work. It’s a shame that so many keep quitting initiatives hoping the next one will immediately bring fortune and fame. Each time they needlessly stop and start over, their success is even further delayed.
Or, feeling crushed by disappointment, it’s common to stop showing up for marketing altogether. This prevents their ideal customers from finding them, and their business continues to struggle- which doesn’t help much with the disappointment factor.
We’ve been raised in a culture that associates failure with a lack of skill or even worth. Without doing the thought work to reframe our understanding of failure, many of us consider a failed marketing attempt a sign that we shouldn’t try again and maybe even that our business is doomed.
Reframing Failure Will Make You a Better Marketer
When clients come to us after trying and “failing” at marketing, they’re often battling imposter syndrome, self-doubt, and fear. In other words, the biggest obstacle they have to honing a marketing strategy that works is their own negative self-talk.
We’ve seen this enough that we wanted to share some options for reframing how you think about failure. This shift will make you a better marketer, and it will make marketing a lot more fun.
Pro tip: failure is actually your friend. A tough love one, for sure, but a friend that’s always nudging you toward the insights you need to get those wins.
OK. Let’s say you tried something with your marketing and it didn’t work out the way you hoped. You spent money on it, you put effort into it and now you feel like that investment wasn’t justified. What should you do?
Let’s go step by step.
#1 Get Objective: Was It Actually Failure?
First, consider whether your marketing initiative is even mature enough to be evaluated.
Have you been posting once a day on Instagram and haven’t seen your follower account grow exponentially? Darling, that isn’t a failure. You simply haven’t been posting enough for long enough.
Did you write 5 blog posts in the last 6 months and not land on Page 1 of Google for your keyphrases yet? Again, you haven’t been posting enough for long enough.
Have you not sold a spot to your membership 3 days into your launch, a week before the cart closes? It doesn’t feel urgent yet to your buyers! Stick to your launch promotion plan and keep reminding your followers they gotta get in while they can.
Do your research and set appropriate expectations for how long it takes and what’s required before you’re likely to see a return on investment.
FYI, according to marketing thought leaders, here is roughly how long it takes for some common types of marketing to work:
Content Marketing: 6-9 months
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): 6-12 months
Google Adwords: 6-12 months
Social Media Marketing: 6 months
If you haven’t spent that long producing quality content at the recommended frequency, don’t consider your efforts failed. Keep going.
#2 Get Kind: Remember Failure is Inevitable & Failure Is Necessary
If you did set appropriate goals and post enough for long enough and still didn’t grow your following or make the sales you wanted, don’t despair.
Life would be pretty boring if we all just walked around knowing everything there is to know, getting everything perfectly right on the first try.
There is no light without darkness. We feel the joy of wins so deeply because we know the sting of loss. Rejection is redirection. Failure is more information about what doesn’t work. And when you adjust what you’re doing based on that insight, it’s the catalyst for you trying something that really does work.
“So, go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can, because that's where you will find success: on the far side of failure.”
#3 Get Creative: Freedom to Fail Leads To Greater Innovation
How slowly our society would advance if no one ever took a moonshot. (Astro Teller, head of X (formerly Google X), has a great TED Talk all about this.)
It’s been widely reported how many famous business, medical, & athletic successes were preceded by a string of failures. The leaders of giants like Google, Intuit, Coca-Cola, and Amazon have been quoted on how highly they value lessons from failure.
From Harvard Business Review, to Inc, to Fast Company, to Forbes, business publications have tons of articles on the innovations that came from failure.
“If you’re going to take bold bets, they’re going to be experiments. And if they’re experiments, you don’t know ahead of time if they’re going to work. Experiments are by their very nature prone to failure. But a few big successes compensate for dozens and dozens of things that didn’t work.”
- Jeff Bezos, founder & executive chairman of Amazon
*Including this quote is not an endorsement of Amazon’s labor practices
No risk, no reward. If you’re taking strategic chances at bigger and better things, that courage deserves celebration. Even when you fail, you’re likely to gain priceless insight that will direct you to your next big win.
“If we're not making mistakes, we're not trying hard enough.”
#4 Get Smart: What Did You Learn From the Failure?
Each failure holds a lesson, often several. When you adopt a curious rather than ashamed mindset and really sit down and think about the failure, you generally get some pretty great ideas about what to try next.
Outside perspectives can be invaluable here. If you have the budget, you can bring on a marketing consultant or hire a skilled market research firm to find out precisely what went wrong. You can also do some casual market research on your own by talking with your customers, your team, and your colleagues.
Identifying what went wrong prevents you from making the same mistake on your next try.
Want more on this? Check out Tim Harford’s TED Talk on how complex systems evolve from trial and error.
#5 Get Proactive: What Will You Do Differently Next Time?
To make the most of failure, don’t just stay in analysis mode. Do something with the insight.
I’m going to share some examples of our own marketing failures, and how they motivated us to adjust our tactics.
Flatlining Blogs
Disappointed my dope marketing blog posts weren’t getting more views and recognition, I checked out the latest insights on how often you need to post to build brand awareness and boost search rankings.
I am now 2 months into a 6 month experiment of posting at least one blog post a week and am already blown away by the results. Suddenly I’m on Page 1 of Google for some of my most strategic keywords. My website is getting much more organic traffic. And we’re building a dedicated, core audience that looks to us for marketing information.
All that despite failing to post for 2 weeks!
Low Domain Authority
Like all new websites, the M.Isa website started with no domain authority. Even my increased blog posting and scores of web pages weren’t leading to the pickup I wanted.
So, I factored acquiring backlinks more seriously into my strategy.
I got diligent about responding to relevant queries on Help a Reporter Out (HARO), I guested on podcasts, and I started making plans for more collaborations.
It only took a few backlinks to start climbing in domain authority, trust & citation flow, and to improve our Alexa Ranking.
Bad-Fit Leads
At first, M.Isa’s web copy had a clinical, corporate tone. It was crisp, authoritative, and formal, but not exactly a standout, recognizably unique brand voice. I was careful to be inoffensive, not too political, and I used a lot of business jargon. I offered too many options and accommodations, and ridiculously underpriced my services.
Not surprisingly, this didn’t exactly pull in the badass, creative business rebels I longed to work with.
I wasn’t shifting the power dynamics I wanted to shift with my messaging, so I wasn’t attracting clients who wanted to disrupt the status quo like I did.
Instead, we got bites from the corporate types and the nickel and dime types I’d hoped to never have to work with again. Failure.
So, I stopped toning down my own radical voice and vibes. I swore, as is natural for me. I showed up in my power-clashing outfits and outlandish lipstick. I narrowed down the “who we work with” lists on the website a lot and made sure to extend a specific invite to businesses led by queer folk, people of color, & women because I have a lot of direct experience with the challenges specific to being a historically marginalized entrepreneur.
Now we’re landing our dream clients. 😉
#6 Get Brave: What Action is Required Now?
In the examples above, you’ll see that we shifted our marketing strategy based on these failures. We allocated the resources to post a blog once a week, we devoted a couple hours a week to getting backlinks, and we shifted our messaging to reflect our true, authentic, edginess and audacity.
To make the most of failure, it’s important to incorporate the insight you’ve gained into how you’re going to approach marketing moving forward. You don’t correct the fail with one post. You build a stronger strategy.
#7 Get Real: Are These Things Doable?
Don’t let your fear of failure convince you to take on too much work.
What is actually doable for your business in terms of the time, money, and marketing-skill level you have available?
Sometimes, this means you’ll have to adjust your expectations. When you see you don’t have the resources available to achieve a goal within your ideal timeline, you’ll understand that it’s better to set an achievable goal than continuously “fail” at an impossible task.
For example, to build brand awareness, it’s recommended that small businesses post 3-4 new blog posts a week. With our current staff, we couldn’t do that and serve our clients. Hell, we couldn’t do that and also have time to sleep every night. So, I decided 1 post a week would have to suffice and I’m happy with the slow but sure gains this strategy is netting.
Don’t punish yourself for a failure. Perfectionism and overwork will only make you miserable. And it’s hard to send out the vibes that bring customers in when you are miserable.
Take the insight from failure to set appropriate goals and doable strategy.
Turns Out, You Can Get a Lot Out of “Failure”
If you started reading this post because you were stress Googling after you made a mistake or had a setback, I sincerely hope it brought you some peace of mind.
You were supposed to fail because you had to get the insight you needed to win bigger than you ever dreamed was possible. Take failure as a teacher and a catalyst. The only way to fail at failure is to stop trying to get what you want.
Not sure why your marketing isn’t getting the results you hoped for? Turn failure into gold with a Customized Marketing Plan.
