How To Not Lose Sleep Over a Marketing Campaign

If you’ve ever run a marketing campaign, you’d know all too well the feelings involved when the campaign goes live.

You hit GO on the computer, and sit back with a sigh of relief, feeling good about all the hard work you’ve put into researching, planning, executing, tweaking, getting approval for, and the fact that is now finally live out there for the world to see.

Not for long.

5 minutes into the campaign, a sense of nervousness creeps in, questioning yourself about all the things that could go wrong.

Is my targeting done right? Have I nailed the landing page copy? How about mobile responsiveness? Is the CRM integration working? What conversion rate can I expect? What if it fails??!!

Many people spend more time stressing about the effectiveness of their campaign. Quite frankly, more time than it took to completely execute the campaign itself.

People spend their weekends and late nights thinking about it; checking for results, tweaking little things, in the hopes of delivering a little bit more of an increase. It’s a mental torture – killing yourself over a marketing campaign is just not worth it.

To speak into this problem, here’s an unusual way to put things in perspective, so marketers can at least sleep at night during a campaign:

P.S – We’d say 99% of marketers don’t look at things this way.

Marketing is an investment

Just take yourself out of the complexity of Landing Pages, Lead Magnets and Facebook Ads for a minute. Marketing is a business activity, and business is about stewarding your resources for maximum results.

Taking on extra staff is to invest in payroll to purchase time from people to get stuff done; paying for software solutions is to speed up human processing and reduce labour costs, and hiring an accountant is to make sense of your numbers for better decisions with your resources. You get the point.

Marketing, in the business context, has only one purpose – to increase revenue.

Duh – Business 101 stuff.

So in layman’s term, marketing should merely be looked at as spending x and getting y. Any agenda to “build the brand” or “show authenticity” is a waste of money. Marketing always relates to sales. Period.

And if you dabble into the world of investments, any smart investor will tell you that emotion is your worst enemy. The better you can look at your investments as mere assets and liabilities, numbers and percentages, the better you’ll get in return.

The minute you overpay on an investment property because you love the look of that new kitchen someone else is going to use, you’re setting your hard-earned money on fire.

Back to marketing.

Relatively speaking, marketing campaigns are high risk investments. Results are mostly unknown, track records can mean very little, it’s time consuming, investments are high (if you want to get any meaningful results), it’s demanding on cash flow, the stakes are high.

At the same time you can also expect high returns. A well executed marketing campaign can easily yield results in the multiples – a charity in Victoria spent $9000 on Facebook Ads in 2018 and resulted in $750K in online donations; same goes to a specialised bike shop in Queensland (executed by our friends at Cloud Clicks), who has hit $1 million dollars in extra revenue in a single quarter, based on a $30K ad spend.

That’s why it’s important to look at marketing from the lens of traditional investment. Take the emotions out, invest big if you want results, but only consider investing in a marketing campaign with the money you can afford to lose.

Sound too cut throat?

Yes – when you think about marketing as the above, it does sound very odd and intimidating.

And it does take the fun and creativity out. Who becomes a Marketer to work as a full-time gambler? How about all the fun things with marketing – the graphic design, copywriting, videography and data analysis?

There’s still a place for these driving forces for good marketing results, but you have to understand the war in order to win the battles.

In our next blog, we are going to bring the fun back to marketing, and show you practically what types of campaigns to create in order for your short term and long term results, just like a good old-fashioned financial advisor!

So make sure you subscribe to get notified when the next blog is released! By signing up you will also receive a FREE copy of our eBook – The 4 Untold Truths of Digital Marketing.

Until then, happy investing!