The biggest mistake I see marketers of every seniority and industry make is killing their productivity, wasting resources, and causing massive amounts of frustration. The mistake is not listening to their customers. It often comes in the form of falling in love with an idea or campaign and spending tons of time perfecting all the aspects before launching and then… crickets. Prospects and customers aren’t responding, there’s no engagement, but they worked so hard and love their work so much, it must be able to be fixed. So they rework the copy, create some new visuals, throw more money into promotion, and still the traction isn’t there. So they find another metric to justify the success of the campaign, building awareness, number of impressions, evergreen assets for use down the road. But they can’t admit to themselves that it was a failure because they never listened to their customers in the first place.
As a creative it’s easy to fall in love with an idea, and once you’ve poured your heart and soul into the work, sunk cost fallacy kicks in, and it is too painful to imagine that the idea may have been flawed in the first place. Even with market research, years in your industry, and engaging with your customers regularly, not every campaign will hit. Learn to fail fast. It is better to realize that the idea isn’t working than to waste more time and effort for minimal results. Try running a pilot program, a scaled-down version of your great idea first, something that doesn’t take a lot of time or money to set up, and then if it is successful, build out the big beautiful campaign of your dreams.
Your customers and prospects vote with their feet, their clicks, and the time spent reading or watching what you’ve created. Listen to them. Don’t let your ego trap you into a campaign that has no chance of success. Once you’ve seen that the results aren’t there, learn your lesson and move on. As the famous Nelson Mandela quote goes, there’s no failing, you either win or you learn. Don’t kill your own chances of learning by holding on too tightly for too long. The next time your campaign isn’t performing how you want don’t make the biggest mistake other marketers make, instead of blaming which image you chose or the exact right headline, take a step back and ask yourself, have I really listened to my customers?