I’m going to take a wild guess about what you’ve been up to lately. Call me psychic, but I’m guessing you’ve been angling for budget over the last few months. I’ll go a step farther and predict that in doing so, you only shared your successes. The programs and campaigns that didn’t work, the spending that didn’t quite pay off—those probably went unmentioned.
Okay, I’m not really psychic. I just know that end of year is when many marketers ask for a budget for the year ahead. I also know that marketers love to highlight their achievements (who doesn’t?) and ignore everything else. That might seem like a successful strategy in the short run—hey, if you got your budget, you did good, right? But that approach can actually hurt you in the long run.
Here’s why. Too many marketing departments launch campaigns in a vacuum. They meet their quota, congratulate themselves, and raise the quota for next time. What they don’t do? Look at the conversion rate. They don’t gain any insight into what drove their successes and failures, or how they can optimize future efforts. And so they ignore the wave of leads who didn’t convert. The programs that crashed and burned. All that wasted time and budget.
