I’ve been working with a B2B organization for the past couple of weeks on a few paid advertising campaigns to generate new leads. At our first status meeting, we weren’t seeing very good numbers. This led to the question, “What needs to change?”

It’s a simple question with a complex answer. The knee jerk reaction is to stop doing it. Sometimes this makes sense, but often just stopping (or never starting) doesn’t allow us to evolve in a meaningful way. It can prevent us from collecting the data we need to make sure we’re successful in the future.

A few months ago I was in a meeting with a client and a member of the Amazon team. My team and I just launched my client’s brand on Amazon and we were working to help grow B2C sales. The discussion about success on Amazon specifically actually applies to digital success in general. The message is simple:

You can’t wait for everything to be perfect (or what you think is perfect). To be successful you need to listen to your audience and what they want. It’s probably going to evolve over time, just like your strategy will need to evolve. If you don’t put anything out, you’ll never be able to start listening, to start collecting data. Without data, without an audience that you can listen to, you will never be successful.

The Amazon team had plenty of examples that always helps ease troubled minds because this truly is a mindset. It’s something that can be tough to do, especially when it’s your money being spent and your business on the line. That’s why it’s important to have a plan that is nimble, that allows you to evolve as the digital world evolves.

What’s not working?

It’s is always the question, when something’s not going as planned. In reality, it should always be the question. Even when something’s successful it’s valuable to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses so that it has the chance to become more successful.

I’ve said it before and will say it again now. The thing that I love about the digital world is how rapidly it changes. How quickly it evolves. With this in mind, you have to make sure that your organization can evolve as well. I’m not saying you need to be leading the charge, but I am saying that you should be aware of the digital world and the impact that it could have on your audiences. Then, you can think about your role in that world.

In the project I mentioned above there are a number of things that could not have worked. Their campaigns were running on LinkedIn as we were trying to target professionals of a specific level within specific organizations. The ads drove users to landing pages with a form that collected contact information to help the sales team stuff their sales funnel.

It’s important that when you’re evaluating what’s working and what’s not that you’re honest with yourself. That you use data. It’s important to take a step back and look at the whole picture. When we started to evaluate the campaigns, our first step was to list all the elements involved so that we’d have a complete picture.

Here’s our list (we created this for each campaign) for the top of the funnel:

1. The ad (The first touchpoint)
   1. The offer
   2. The target audience
   3. The creative
   4. The ad type
   5. The ad copy
2. The landing page (The ask)
   1. The page design
   2. The page copy
   3. The form fields
   4. The technology (Does is work)

Once we identified the elements we looked at the data to find the possible problem points. In this case the click-through rate (CTR) of the ads was very low (less than 1%), so we decided to start evolving there.

Control the evolution.

I mentioned the importance of data above (and in other posts on this blog). Everyone should agree that making data driven decisions is a good thing. The more you know the better decisions you can make.

In the project I’ve been discussing, it’s important to note that these were their first LinkedIn campaigns. There was no historical data, they did research on the types of businesses they wanted to target and the individuals that made the decisions at those organizations.

Once we identified the step in the process that needed to evolve it became important to ensure that there was a plan in place to make changes in a controlled way. A way that allows us to track the success or failure of each change. After all, this would be part of the historical data for the organization in the future. By making changes 1 by 1 we were able to track the most impactful changes.

In this case, I suggested starting with the simple change to the ad copy. To make it less generic and more conversational. To make it more engaging and to make it work with the landing page copy, not parrot the same message. By starting with this easy to change element, my team was able to work on new creative, while the copy changes were being tested.

Having a process is important. Being organized is important. Being nimble is important. To evolve in a meaningful way and create a meaningful foundation you have to know your audiences. You can’t know your audiences if you don’t invest in getting to know them. If you don’t understand them and what they like, what they dislike, how they talk, and how they think. Data allows emotion to be removed from the equation.

To evolve in a meaningful way, make sure that there’s an equation and that there’s data. If there’s not you’re really just shooting in the dark. No two platforms are the same, so just because you’ve had success on one platform with one approach doesn’t mean you’ll see the same success on another platform with the same strategy.