While a cam­paign fail­ure does take the wind out of your sails (and sales), it also presents an oppor­tu­ni­ty to learn, piv­ot and come back stronger. With the right analy­sis and doc­u­men­ta­tion, mar­ket­ing fail­ures can become gold­mines for shap­ing future cam­paigns.

Not every mar­ket­ing cam­paign is met with the same suc­cess as Intel’s “Intel Inside” or Coca Cola’s “Share a Coke” cam­paign. In fact, some­times even the most care­ful­ly exe­cut­ed cam­paigns are met with crick­ets. Why? What caus­es one cam­paign to catch on like wild­fire while anoth­er fails to even cre­ate a spark? There are a vari­ety of rea­sons — tim­ing, a change in the mar­ket, com­pe­ti­tion, to name a few. But, the two most com­mon rea­sons for mar­ket­ing cam­paign fail­ure are not tru­ly know­ing your mar­ket or cre­at­ing a prod­uct that doesn’t solve a true mar­ket prob­lem. Here are five ways to turn low per­form­ers into win­ning oppor­tu­ni­ties.

1. Get Out And Talk To The Market

If most mar­ket­ing cam­paigns fail because they don’t res­onate with the tar­get mar­ket, then it only makes sense to get out from behind the com­put­er and go talk to those peo­ple. What do they care about? What prob­lems do they have? How do they define or think about your prod­uct? Where do they get their news and infor­ma­tion? Maybe you had the right mes­sag­ing, but didn’t deliv­er it through the right chan­nels.

2. Redefine Your Market

You and your team like­ly defined the mar­ket dur­ing the prod­uct devel­op­ment phase, or at the very least pri­or to the ini­tial mar­ket­ing cam­paign. But it may be time to revis­it this to be sure you are in fact tar­get­ing the right mar­ket. The afore­men­tioned inter­views will help you deter­mine this. You might find there’s actu­al­ly a sub­group of the orig­i­nal group you were mar­ket­ing to that will be a bet­ter fit, or that the mar­ket has shift­ed alto­geth­er. Once you’ve reaf­firmed or refined your tar­get mar­ket, cre­ate three to five per­sonas for the type of peo­ple you want to reach. These per­sonas are not stereo­types, but arche­types based on facts and find­ings from research and inter­views. Your per­sona needs to have a name, age, occu­pa­tion, likes and dis­likes, favorite prod­ucts, hob­bies, news sources, etc. to estab­lish a clear pic­ture of who your prod­ucts are for. You need to have an under­stand­ing of their over­all goals or desired cus­tomer expe­ri­ence when they use your prod­ucts and ser­vices.

3. Dig Into The Numbers

As painful as it may be to review lack­lus­ter num­bers, don’t avoid them. These pro­vide a wealth of insight. You might bench­mark these against pre­vi­ous suc­cess­ful cam­paigns or sim­ply take note of what worked and what didn’t. The key here is to go beyond the sur­face. Don’t just look at your email open rate. Instead review what time that email was most opened. Did a cer­tain sub­ject line per­form bet­ter than anoth­er? What was hap­pen­ing in the news that day? What was clicked on most in that email? Did it include a call to action? Doc­u­ment what was effec­tive ver­sus inef­fec­tive and refer to this in plan­ning your next cam­paign.

4. Understand The Stages

Along every buy­er jour­ney there are mul­ti­ple stages. Your job is to iden­ti­fy what those stages are and cre­ate mes­sages spe­cif­ic to each. These mes­sages should address objec­tions buy­ers may have at each of those stages, but also artic­u­late your brand’s strengths. If you already have cus­tomers, find out why they bought from you and at what stage they decid­ed to make that com­mit­ment. Per­haps more impor­tant­ly, talk to poten­tial cus­tomers, those cur­rent­ly look­ing at your solu­tion as well as the competitor’s. What do they care about? What objec­tions do they have? Refine your mes­sag­ing and strat­e­gy accord­ing­ly.

5. Debrief With The Team

This ses­sion is not about fin­ger point­ing or plac­ing blame. All involved must feel com­fort­able con­tribut­ing to this con­ver­sa­tion. Check all egos at the door. Estab­lish a pos­i­tive tone. The goal of your team debrief is to iden­ti­fy the root caus­es behind what worked and what didn’t. Dis­cuss what the cam­paign suc­cess­es were and what can be improved upon. What did you dis­cov­er dur­ing your cus­tomer inter­views and mar­ket research? How can you more effec­tive­ly speak to and reach the per­sonas you’ve iden­ti­fied? Doc­u­ment what can be used in the future then cre­ate an action plan for revis­ing the mar­ket­ing cam­paign. Going for­ward be sure you are mea­sur­ing at inter­vals along the way so you can make adjust­ments or quick­ly piv­ot before you ven­ture too far deep into the mar­ket­ing cam­paign. Reg­u­lar check-ins and debrief­in­gs with the team can help you avoid spend­ing valu­able time and bud­get on inef­fec­tive strate­gies.