There’s something to be said about staying on top of the latest marketing trends for your business. If you test one out and deliver great results, you’re a marketing superstar. But if you’re always chasing the latest business trend and it’s negatively affecting your success – that’s another story.

Shiny Object Syndrome Is a Thing for Marketers

Anytime you focus all your attention on trying the latest trends, strategies, or tactics to the detriment of your carefully laid out marketing campaigns, you could be suffering from shiny object syndrome. Instantly adopting what’s new and abandoning proven marketing strategy can leave you (and your team) distracted and overwhelmed. What’s more, your productivity will likely slump, too.

4 Consequences of Shiny Object Syndrome

1. Risking Achievable Goals

You can become easily frustrated with your goals when they’re constantly changing. Using your energy and resources to re-plan all the time rather than getting things done will mess with your deadlines and deliverables. With current processes halted and progress stifled, your well-thought-out business goals could be at risk.

2.  Poor Metrics and Results

If you switch or tweak plans too frequently, you won’t gather enough data to test new tactics, let alone see results from the strategy that was already in place.

3.  Time Wasting

Every time you adopt something new, the time investment to learn how to use it, integrate it, and become proficient at it can drain your resources. You could end up making little progress or undoing any advance you’ve already made. Your business could suffer as a result.

4.  Creating Stress and Anxiety

Goal setting and an efficient way of achieving those goals is usually a great motivator. Constantly changing the workflow can impede productivity, adversely affect efficiency, and stress out your team.

A better approach to adopting new marketing trends might be to focus on your marketing funnel and then get behind new ideas that can strengthen your planned marketing campaigns in support of your customer’s journey to a sale. This way, you can leverage the progress you’re already making and possibly enhance your results.

What Is a Marketing Funnel?

A marketing funnel represents the stages people journey through on their way to getting to know your business and what you offer them. It’s a simple framework for marketers to:

• Learn more about your target audience.
• Tailor your marketing approach for engagement.
• Identify and address weak areas of your buying process.
• Create a more effective marketing strategy that gets more sales.
• Get context for your marketing results to put them in perspective.

How To Use Your Marketing Funnel To Create Successful Marketing Campaigns

Marketing differs from advertising in that its purpose is to raise awareness of your business and convince people to purchase your products and services (Advertising is the persuasive messaging created to help you achieve these goals.). Marketers use their marketing funnel to help build more focused campaigns for marketing strategy. For instance, the typical stages of a marketing funnel can inform the different areas of your campaign:

Awareness Stage: Branded content that resonates with your audience makes them more receptive to future interaction.

Consideration: Brand advocacy and social influence help audiences make favorable comparisons between your company and competitors.

Conversion: A simple, direct purchasing process reduces the risk of audiences making poor buying decisions.

Loyalty: A program to nurture and maintain your audience that features regular discounts, consistent email interactions, special social media events, and more.

Advocacy: An invitation to continue to support your company with future marketing funnels rewards receptive, loyal audiences.

Overall, you can use your marketing funnel to inform the following steps for creating a successful marketing campaign.

1. Set a purpose and goal.

Why are you creating this strategy, and what do you want to accomplish for your business? Discuss ideas like improving brand awareness, driving leads, boosting audience engagement, introducing new products or services, and more.

2. Establish metrics for measuring results.

Whether it’s email open rates, new social media followers, pre-orders, or something else, choose measurements for each medium you’re using that relate to your overall marketing goal.

3. Decide the marketing funnel stage you want to target and identify audience pain points.

Use this information to create a buyer persona that represents your target audience for the campaign.

4. Brainstorm a mission, vision, and visual identity.

Visually and creatively, great campaign concepts take their cues from your overall business brand. They support your brand while having their own identity.

5. Set a timeline and choose the channels.

Where will you run your campaign? The answer depends on audience preference, budget, and brand engagement levels. Map out your marketing campaign based on a deadline so you’ll know when, how, and the frequency of promotion.

6. Establish relevant calls to action.

Ensure your campaign is inspiring the audience to take the desired action, which should be tied to the goal of your campaign.

7. Track metrics and establish what defines success.

What numbers from the metrics you established earlier will show campaign success? Again, this relates directly to your defined campaign goal.

8. Analyze and apply results.

Did you meet the goal? Great! If you didn’t, use the data to find out why. Your data analysis will also clarify things about your audience, the effectiveness of your media channels, your budget, the validity of your messaging and marketing strategy, and more. Applying your results to future campaigns will maximize the impact on your overall business success.

11outof11 Knows Marketing Campaigns

When you want to focus your marketing campaigns on your customer’s journey, connect with 11outof11. Request a complimentary call with an 11outof11 expert. Contact us to learn more.