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When To Cut Your Losses On An Online Marketing Campaign

This article is more than 8 years old.

As a professional marketer, I like to think that marketing is equal parts science and art. Like with science, you need to form conclusions based on observable data, and gradually refine your processes to get the best results. Like with art, you need to be creative and harness the power of your own ingenuity to achieve something great.

Despite my philosophy that scientific processes and artful approaches will always yield tangible results, the reality is that marketing is somewhat unpredictable. Audiences can be researched and marginally understood, but they can’t be controlled or predicted, and as a result, marketing deviates from the science/art approach and becomes something more akin to a gamble.

Still, smart gambling can pay off. You just have to know when to keep investing and when to cut your losses and walk away—even though walking away is never easy.

When you realize that a marketing strategy is failing—or not performing as well as you expected it to—at what point do you cut your losses and walk away from it? How much do you spend before abandoning your investment?

These factors will help you decide for any online marketing strategy.

You’ve Given It Time

Online marketing is often a slow boil. For example, in search engine optimization (SEO), it can take months before you start to see any forward momentum, then all of a sudden, you’ll see an influx of new visitors and you can start reaping the rewards every month. In this strategy, you’ll face a few tough months of initial investment but then positive and compounding returns. Similarly, strategies like content marketing require you to build an initial reputation before you start earning the long-term benefits.

If you’ve given a strategy its fair amount of time and it’s still underperforming, it’s probably time to move on. The “time” factor here is relative; six months without results on an SEO campaign might be normal, but two weeks without results on a Google AdWords PPC campaign should raise a red flag. Know the pacing of your target strategy, and evaluate it based on that.

Your ROI Is Consistently Negative

When it comes to marketing, the number you want to focus on is ROI—your total return on investment. You can measure this by comparing your total gains (in the form of increased sales or new customers), to your total expenditures. If you yield a positive ROI, there’s nothing to be concerned about, even if the campaign isn’t performing as well as you’d hoped. If you yield a negative ROI, it means you’re losing money. Still, fluctuations in marketing are normal, so if you have one month with a bad ROI, it isn’t a sign that you should jump ship. Only if you encounter a negative ROI consistently, after several periods of measurement, should you be ready to move on.

The one exception here is with an SEO campaign. SEO campaigns often require months or even a year or more to return a positive ROI. This is because SEO campaigns need to be thought of as long-term investments, often requiring extensive brand-building and a strategic content marketing campaign to achieve real ROI.

You’ve Experimented With It

Few marketing strategies are successful outright, even with months of research and planning to back them up. Only when they hit the execution phase is it possible to learn how your audience reacts to them. If you haven’t tried experimenting with your approach, make that your first step before abandoning your strategy altogether. You may find that a handful of simple tweaks is enough to take your strategy from dead in the water to thriving.

For example, on landing pages, sometimes changing the position of your text, the length of your form fields, or the color of your “submit” button is enough to multiply your total number of conversions. In SEO, changing your target topic keywords can give you a spike in traffic. Using a new medium in your content strategy could open you up to a brand new audience. It pays to play around with a strategy before leaving it for others.

Your Other Strategies Are Working Well

If you have one strategy that’s doing poorly, but the rest of your strategies are doing well, it’s a sign that you should abandon the underperformer. Your other strategies performing well is an indication that your foundation—that is to say, your branding and your core approach—is solid. The problem is with one particular strategy, and it may be that the strategy in question simply isn’t a good fit for your company. It happens more often than you think.

Your Execution Can’t Be Improved

Most online marketing strategies demand some level of active management—for example, content needs written, PPC ads need managed, and SEO campaigns need monitored, adjusted, and measured. You probably have an in-house marketing team or an outside marketing firm handling these responsibilities. If one of your strategies is underperforming, these are the first places you should look. Is your team working efficiently and correctly to ensure the proper execution of this campaign? If not, start by making improvements or hiring new talent to give the strategy a shot. If so and the strategy is still not working, the strategy is the problem, and it’s time to let go.

In marketing, there are always likelihoods but never guarantees. What works well for one company will fail for another, and even the best-laid marketing plans can falter due to simple, unpredictable fluctuations in the market; the trick is to identify your bad eggs early and replace them with something better. Don’t be discouraged, either, as marketing is a rotating experiment, and short-term failures are a necessary part of achieving long-term success.