An inseparable part of any marketing strategy is to identify the risks along with the opportunities. If you only concentrate on one or the other, you leave yourself at risk of going downhill, which is the opposite of what you want to achieve with marketing. Here are a few common marketing risks you will encounter or are already facing and resolve them with proper risk management in your marketing campaign.
1. Brand Value
With marketing, you choose what light your business is presented to the general population, which is why you need to do it right. You may be surprised at how quite a minor mistake will harm your brand’s reputation among not only your target audience but also prospective customers.
Losing brand value is a considerably high risk in the case of social media marketing. Essentially, you’re putting out your business’s services and products for the world to see since social media is where the majority of your users are now. But you aren’t talking to a brick wall — your users can comment back and give real-time feedback about everything they love or loathe about your brand. This creates a domino effect that either work in your favor or not, depending on how the majority views your business. The backlash from social media can be disastrous for small and large companies alike.
2. Miscalculation Fails
In marketing, everything ties back to everything. Insufficient keyword research and audience targeting could harm your SEO and branch out to affect your PPC campaigns if you based your efforts on both with the same research. Miscalculating in advance can lead to an array of disadvantages for your business, such as wasting marketing budgets on paid ads that don’t perform, executing campaigns that don’t yield the expected results, and more. Additionally, reaching out to audiences outside of your target audience won’t generate much quality leads across any of the channels you’re concentrating efforts on.
3. Loss of Trust
Aside from impacts on your reputation, it’s arguably worse when your company begins to lose the trust of your current and potential customers. This can easily be achieved in false promises and misleading marketing campaigns that do not correspond to the reality of the product or service you are offering. For example, if your business is offering digital marketing services and claims to be the “best” or promises 5000 followers in a week but doesn’t happen in reality, your marketing efforts will flop.
Creating a Marketing Risk Management Plan
How do you get around all of these risks, then? Of course, the risk will always be present to some degree, as with everything else in life, despite how much you prepare against it. You can, however, refrain from many marketing fails and risks by assessing and analyzing your strategy significantly before executing it. Here are a few steps you can take to:
- Monitor and track processes constantly to ensure you aren’t doing more damage than good. Pause that social ad beforehand if it isn’t performing as well as others or as well as intended. Instead, take the time to analyze what’s going wrong; perhaps the best move is investing that budget into an ad performing better.
- Linking to the previous point, keep backup responses in mind to risks that you know can arise. For example, are you posting something on social media that you think may stir the pot or cause some backlash? Tactfully think of how you’re going to respond to this if you’re going forward with the campaign nonetheless.
- Analyze potential risks instead of tackling them when they turn into inconveniences. Pinpointing when you need to remove or alter any element of your marketing strategy before it becomes destructive is much easier than dealing with the consequences later.
4. Consistency and Effort
Being unable to maintain consistency of efforts is one-way businesses stray away from success. Marketing processes such as search engine optimization and social media management require long-term efforts before providing many results for your business. Similarly, you don’t want to be putting all of your efforts into marketing campaigns that just aren’t working—for example, sticking to an old-fashioned strategy without reviewing it now and then. This leaves your business vulnerable to being invisible in the ocean of more up-to-date trends and practices.
Marketing your business is one of the few occasions you don’t want to move forward with a “high risk, high reward” mindset. Instead, ensure your strategy will pay off and put significant effort in doing so to reach the best results.
