Nothing is worse than spending money and resources for nothing: no learnings, no results, or anything to show except invoices. That’s a surefire way to land on the watchlist of those controlling your budgets. While not all money waste can be eliminated, most can be avoided by working smarter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whether it’s building a business, honing a product, or doing marketing, you’re looking for the same returns on your investment:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Business performance: This is simple. You need to see results toward your goals, which are usually monetary in the end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Validated learning: When you take risks and test new approaches, you won’t always achieve immediate business performance. This isn’t failure if you’ve gained valuable insights and knowledge from your investment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Both of these outcomes work. Even when your marketing investment doesn’t directly generate revenue, it’s not necessarily wasted money. You either win or learn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now, what exactly is wasted money? It’s spending that gives you nothing in return. Simple logic, right? Let’s explore how you might be wasting marketing dollars so you can avoid these pitfalls in the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Halfway through the buildup of a campaign, someone decides to take another direction and scrap everything that has been done so far. This is usually due to poor planning. The saying “an ounce of preparation can save you a pound of cure”\u2014or a ton of money. The earlier you can change directions, the better, and the less money lost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Solution: To make sure you don’t waste money like this, put an emphasis on planning, especially scenario planning. Spend ample time upfront to avoid having to change directions later when it’s more costly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I’m going to tell you never to change direction of your digital campaigns too early or too late, so you don’t waste your resources. At the same time, you’re not going to like the answer to your question: “When is just right?” It depends. It depends on the data you have collected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you make optimizations or change directions in your ongoing campaigns before you have significant enough results, you may be making decisions that are not based on facts, and may set yourself up for a bad road in the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conversely, if you allow campaigns to run too long without incorporating insights from your test results, you’re missing opportunities to improve performance, as timely optimization based on the available data could yield better outcomes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Solution: When you have significant enough results based on the KPIs you’ve set for your testing, make the optimizations. If you need to play it safe, go a bit over rather than under timewise, to make sure you have proper results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Buying is a skill, even in marketing. You can choose between expensive, slow services from familiar legacy brands or lean, modern services. You might also opt for goals or efforts-based cooperation. The worst approach is when there’s no clear alignment on goals between parties and you pay for a retainer of work rather than goal completion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Solution: Focus on the cost-of-goal-achievement when buying services. This doesn’t mean you must buy performance-based services, as this model doesn’t work for many industries. Still, you should align with your service provider and determine how much you’re willing to invest to achieve your specific goals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Obviously, if you can’t properly measure, you can’t make data-driven decisions, and you’ll likely waste money without knowing it. What trips people up with analytics is not doing enough preparation in advance. Both KPIs and their tracking mechanisms need to be set up beforehand when running campaigns. This is crucial because you can’t obtain data retroactively. There’s no secret data vault on the internet to rescue you\u2014if you don’t track it, you’ll never get that data back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Solution: Don’t fall into the trap of tracking everything just because you can. Track what matters. Follow this simple measurement flow: decide on KPIs, implement tracking, launch your campaign, gather data, then analyze. And if you mess up this time, learn from it and do better next time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One challenge even for data-driven marketers is the dreaded HiPPO\u2014Highest Paid Person’s Opinion. This refers to someone with the biggest paycheck, often with the longest experience, who makes decisions based on gut feeling rather than data. These individuals trust their instincts because they believe their approach has served them well in the past. They typically disregard data-driven decisions, showing a strong bias toward remembering their successes while conveniently forgetting their failures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Solution: These decision-makers can be persuaded, but not with data alone. The key is making them believe it’s their idea or getting them to trust your intuition instead. Being right isn’t enough. You also need to be effective in how you present your case.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, in conclusion, the problems and their solutions we went through:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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