Failing harder – How you definitely do everything wrong with your campaigns

Have you ever asked yourself why B2B campaigns with marketing service providers or partners fail? So have we!

We would like to show you how you can easily do everything wrong in a collaboration in a definitely invented story. Winking included. Next week, we’ll show you how to make external campaigns work for you.

 

A short story about failing campaigns

Due to illness and numerous revisions, the production of the advertising material had taken much longer than expected. The end of the quarter is approaching, the budget pool has not even been touched. Now, let’s get going!

Otherwise you run the risk that you will not be able to get these funds next year. However, nobody among your colleagues has time to take care of another campaign. But a remedy is quickly found: After all, there are numerous partners out there who will implement your campaigns for you. Perfect!

This way you can quickly initiate a contact.

In a first conversation you tell them what really matters – results! Unfortunately, you don’t have the time for questions, the next meeting is waiting.

Two days later you will receive the offer from the new partner for your campaign. Some terms among the services mentioned are not quite familiar to you – probably the product names. All in all, your counterpart has put together an extensive campaign for you. You like that. You can justify the external costs with several measures at once before the division management.

Could we perhaps add some from the last campaign? The topic was slightly different, but in the end everything pays off for your brand. So you quickly send back an e-mail and ask to include other aspects. You will receive an answer fairly quickly: possible in general, but you might want to provide some more information.

Since you really don’t have the time right now, you forward the e-mail to the working student. She should have a better overview than you at the moment due to her onboarding program. The next day you will see the updated offer in your inbox. Due to a meeting you will not be able to answer directly.

In the afternoon you go home early, you don’t feel well. The doctor’s visit with the corresponding sick note for the rest of the week follows the next morning. You completely forgot about the offer…

The end of the quarter is only two weeks away when you return to your workplace, with a completely overfilled mailbox! So the first day you struggle through all the messages you have received and stumble across several emails from the new campaign partner. To ensure that the budget is finally implemented, you give the approval directly and point out again that you need the results in two weeks.

At the start of the new quarter, you will receive the evaluations from your external campaign on time. You are surprised: There are no sales opportunities at all! But you wanted contacts with whom you can prove to your sales department that marketing is just as relevant to sales. Instead, you got an extensive advertising campaign – in the right audience after all. You also read that the working student had the marketing leads she received fed directly into your company software. At least that fits.

At the next strategy meeting, however, you still have to hear that your campaign has missed the planned targets. You do not want to work with this campaign partner in the future…

As you can see, a lot can go amiss in a marketing collaboration! To prevent this from happening to you, we will reveal in our next article how you can successfully avoid muddled situations like this.