Top Ten Demand Generation FAILS (Part 3): May I Have Your Attention, Please!

The stories out there are too numerous to recount. Inattention to detail and follow established process lead to catastrophic failures, sometimes resulting in the needless loss of human lives.

Fortunately for marketers, these types of failures do not result in loss of life, but can result in loss of profits, and worse. Inattention to detail is a guaranteed “campaign killer” when we get down to the quantifying the results.

Most Demand Gen and Marketing Ops professionals know how to check for the biggest sources of mistakes. Many of you probably have QA checklists to look for the obvious issue, such as:

Bad links

Grammar and misspellings

General formatting issues

Other, less obvious mistakes often get through, however. And these can be real campaign killers.

Managing Segmentation: How do you manage your mailing list against the proper segmentation for a given campaign? Is there a mechanism to check the audience to make sure it is appropriate for the communication? Or do you just send to the list you are provided? Or, worse, just send to your entire database?

Content Connection: Is there a seamless transition from your email to your landing page to your asset delivery? Are expectations properly set around what your recipient will receive and how they will receive it? Is branding, look and feel consistent throughout the user experience?

Fair Trade: Is your CTA offer a fair trade for what you’re asking in return from the user? Relative to user expectations on the Internet, does your trade for an asset in exchange for the user’s information demonstrate reasonable reciprocity?

Bait and Switch: Does your asset provide valuable insight or information to the recipient, or is it a thinly disguised sales pitch? Nobody likes to be scammed, so this technique will only result in mass abandonments of your messaging.

Follow Through: So, you’ve crafted a great message, provided a valuable, informative asset and generated great response. What next? Have you provided logical next steps so the recipient can dive deeper into a conversation about your ability to solve her business challenges? Or is the recipient left to rummage through your website to try and figure out what to do next?

Inattention to all of the details is necessary for flawless execution and nowhere is the “weakest link” analogy more appropriate than a close look at demand gen campaign execution. A miss on any of these details is a campaign killer that will stop your responses cold.

Notes:

You cannot expect to execute flawlessly without a detailed campaign execution plan.

You cannot expect to execute flawlessly without strict adherence to your detailed campaign execution plan..

Your campaign execution plan must be a key component of into your overall demand gen process (see this {Demand Gen Brief}).

In next week’s edition, we will look at Demand Generation FAIL Number 4: Where's the Menu? The last note above is the perfect segue to next week’s {Demand Gen Brief}.