Is Your Marketing Too Mainstream?
Sometimes really wonderful marketing campaigns flop—and nobody seems to know why.
Without even seeing the collateral in question, we can offer a quick diagnosis: Your marketing efforts might be too mainstream.
We’ve seen this issue many times—especially since the pandemic, as if businesses got a little nervous about taking risks. Instead, they come up with safe ideas, intended for mass appeal. Those campaigns might earn smiles as drivers pass by, or readers flip the page or digitally click through. But they don’t necessarily inspire people to take action or make a purchase. Without specificity or edginess, the result is forgettable.
Here are a few ways to avoid those mainstream flops:
Stop playing it safe. Your comfort level with taking risks, and the ability to determine which risks will pay off, are professional decisions. It’s a natural inclination, when the world feels increasingly polarized, to steer toward the safest, most familiar ideas. Think low-risk, low-reward! The only content that pleases everyone is generic content, and generic is not “special” or “best” and will not gain attention or market share.
Create variations on a theme. It’s always possible to integrate your collateral to your various audience segments (like millennial moms or their tween sons) or to target the various places your ad will be seen (like a bus stop versus Instagram).
Don’t make smiles your main goal. If you conduct marketing research, look for feedback that goes beyond whether or not your ads are nice, or pretty, or likable. Ask what feelings the work inspires and seek diverse responses. Reach out a week later to learn if your participants can remember much about your promotion. Find out if anyone who responded positively actually went out and bought something or independently attempted to learn more. If you make changes, see if responses change accordingly; apathy and sameness are your worst enemy when you’re hoping to inspire action.
It’s not easy to be the one who looks at a beautiful, inoffensive piece of marketing collateral and tells your colleagues that it simply won’t work. The confidence to do so comes from the ability to say that the work will not help you achieve your goals. That requires experience—but more importantly, it requires tools to track how your campaigns have performed in the past and predict how options will perform best in the future. It also means planning regular check-ins to confirm those expectations, with a readiness to make changes if you’re not seeing results.
Mad 4 Marketing can help you make the best possible choices up-front and strategize for maximum results throughout the run of your campaign. Schedule a consultation to learn more.
