The Nine Biggest Marketing Mistakes (And How to Fix Them)

No Target CPA

Your target cost-per-acquisition (CPA) is the filter through which all marketing decisions are made, regardless of objective. It’s based on lifetime customer value and gross margins. It’s a relatively simple financial calculation that drives optimization.

1

Not Maximizing Customer

Value

Customer value drives both immediate revenue and acquisition scalability. Higher value = higher target cost per acquisition = more media options that will drive profitable growth. Marketing automation systems are a good start, but they need to be optimized by people who know CRM strategy.

2

Cumbersome Process

Marketing processes are often very manual with high-value resources slogging through low-value work. The solution is to focus resources where they add the most value and automate the rest. This allows you to not only speed things up, but also more consistently capture best practices, build brand, and allow creative talent to focus on what is unique and important.

3

Not Understanding Media Channel

DynamicsMore media channels mean more complexity, especially when they affect each other. Understanding these effects is critical to optimizing marketing efforts. There are no magic bullets here – just sound, thorough analysis of data and developing the right testing strategy to reveal what you don’t know today.

4

Not Continuously Testing

If you have a clear target CPA and understand how media channels effect each other, you can continuously test to improve performance. This requires allocating 10-15% of marketing budget to new tests using new media, offers, creative, and more.

5

Not Aggressively Optimizing Media Across

All Channels

The ability to move media dollars within and across media channels is essential. This often requires short-term media buys combined with a dashboard and analytics that allows you to be nimble and opportunistic.

6

Having Two Primary

Objectives

Marketing often has two masters: Brand and Response. But you can’t optimize to both because each will take you in a different direction. When budgets are large, profitable response is often the by-product of building the brand. When budgets are tight, you optimize to results with brand building as the by-product.

7

Drowning in Data

There is more marketing data today than ever before streaming from web sites, CRM systems, digital media, customer databases, retail and more. Making sense of it all is a daunting task. It takes a dedicated effort to take a global view and implement the right tools to turn data into information that drives marketing decisions.

8

Not Knowing If Your Marketing is

Working

Marketing has never been this complex. It can seem impossible to understand all the moving parts. The answer is a more evolved solution that brings together financial modeling, testing, optimization, automation, and advanced analytics. Those organizations that step up to the challenges are the ones that gain market share and achieve significant growth.

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