When you’re deep in the marketing trenches, working hard on tactics and day-to-day activities, it can be easy to lose sight of what your goal truly is — and even get off topic or dilute your marketing message. Luckily, recognizing that you’re off-target is the hard part: getting back on track is easy. But what are the concrete steps you can take to get your marketing back on target?
Revisit your strategy.
Look to your overarching goals and objectives for your campaign to refocus your mind and reframe your marketing tactics. Pay attention to not only what goals you set for yourself, but also look at how you intended to go about accomplishing them. Perhaps those initial tactical ideas were not an exact fit to your overall objective, or maybe they’re perfectly aligned but you haven’t been following them. Revisiting this strategy document will not only help you figure out where you went wrong, but also why. Another problem might be that you don’t have a strategy — and how can you know your marketing target without any larger strategic plan? Revisit Lindsay’s blog post “Is Your Marketing Ready for 2015?” and plan out that strategy to help keep you focused.
Reprioritize your work.
Maybe it’s not something as dramatic as misaligned strategic and tactical goals that’s causing you to lose sight of your target. It might just be that you’re getting too bogged down in tactical issues to see the strategy as a whole. If you’re not seeing the marketing forest for the trees, then take a look at what you are doing on a day-to-day basis. What is most important from a tactical standpoint? What takes up most of your time? What stresses you out the most? If you find yourself focusing on stressful, boring work that takes up too much time, reprioritize. Maybe you need to be focusing on another facet of your daily work that is more directly connected to your goals.
Get an outside perspective.
If you’re truly in the weeds, you might need someone to come along and pull you out. Ask a coworker, preferably one with little to no knowledge of this strategy, to help you out. By explaining to them the goals of your campaign and where you feel you’re going wrong, they should be able to offer a fresh take on the task at hand, help you reprioritize, and get back on track. Plus, you might learn something from them–new suggestions are always beneficial when you’re feeling stuck.
Let us know: what do you do when you realize your marketing is missing the mark?
Photo Credit: Michael from Minnesota
