When your marketing fails

If you hang out in various creative online forums, you’ve likely seen discussion about an irate blog post complaining about those lazy and devious con artists known as copywriters.  I’ll summarize it for you: the top freelancers in the world were hired for many thousands of dollars to write direct response copy, whereupon some missed deadlines, some failed to include major selling points, some took six months to write one letter, and most turned in copy that didn’t convert.  "We paid copywriters $249,500 in fees to lose 6 million" is the fetching title.

The post purports to be about coralling copywriters’ wasteful ways (though there’s also some unsubtle subtext about how the blog author – himself a copywriter – was able to provide million-dollar copy where the best copywriters in the world failed. Not that this was intended to be self-laudatory or promotional in any way, I’m sure.)

But it does bring up a good topic, which is: whose fault is it when the copy just doesn’t seem to work?

I don’t do direct response copy too often, and I certainly do not have the Billy Mays voice required to write in UNDERLINED CAPITALS to sell THE BEST OPPORTUNITIES OF YOUR LIFETIME! But this is still something every creative runs into eventually. You do your best work and turn in what you consider killer content or design and then the client informs you that it bombed. The customers flatly ignored it.

What a horrible feeling. Right away the creative wants to think it’s because the business is substandard, while the business wants to blame the creative work.  Ideally both sides did some due diligence ahead of time to allay these possibilities – the client checked out the freelancer’s portfolio, and the freelancer checked out the service or product to make sure it wasn't a stinker. But failure does happen, and before accusations are traded, it’s best to run down a checklist of possible reasons. In fact, it’s best to head all this off at the very beginning.

~ The product isn’t in demand. Most businesses are born out of passion; sometimes it’s a passion shared by very few people. And that’s hard for business owners to see past their own enthusiasm.

~ The product is in demand, but the market is oversaturated. Differentiation is a buzzword for this reason. Everyone thinks their product is special. But there needs to be a solid UVP to beat out the competition.

~ The product is marketed well, but to the wrong people. Sometimes the wrong audience is targeted or the wrong channel used, resulting in low response.

~ The product is good, but the marketing is inadequate. The creative work really has failed to persuade and sell, or has been partnered with cheap production values.

~ The expectations were unrealistically high.

The magic solution to all of that, of course, is research. Numbers can be run, creative drafts can be tested. But if there were guarantees in marketing, everyone would succeed in business - and a certain acceptance of risk is part of the game.