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The best way to attract customers to buy a product or service is to a marketing campaign. Marketing campaign can be anything you do to make your customers take notice of your product or service and help them make a decision to buy it.

This can take many forms from traditional print media, television, radio to more recent methods like Internet. Internet marketing campaign is another vast and needs different approach compared to all other forms which includes but not limited to banner advertising, Email newsletter, text ads, Google AdWords, affiliate marketing, social media, online videos and feeds, etc.

But most businesses fail to get the value of their marketing campaign due to many reasons. Few of the most important ones are discussed below.

1. No Clear Goal: One of the main reasons for not deriving the value as expected from a marketing campaign is advertisers and marketers do not have a clear goal of their marketing campaign or have no clear marketing strategy. You need to set clear goals before you even start looking out for different channels of your marketing campaign. Settings goals helps you to focus on most relevant things only and devote your time and efforts to achieve your set goals. Another advantage of setting and defining goals is it would be easier to measure your results against your goals, finding whether you have achieved at all or what extent did you achieve them.

2. No Proper Market Research: This is one of the most common reasons for the marketing campaign to fail. Before you start the campaign, do enough market research to find who your target audience are, their geographic and demographic details, market potential, where your customers are looking out for your products or services, etc.

3. No Right Marketing Channels: Selection of right marketing channel is important  aspect in making your campaign successful. There are number of marketing channels to target your customers and you need to select it depending upon the results from your market research. For example, if your target customers are web users, it does not help much if you a campaign on television or radio. Even though it is not a bad idea to do it, the results of running a campaign using Internet media will be more fruitful. You can use variety of methods like Google AdWords, affiliations, promotions, online viral marketing and search engine marketing (SEM). In order to find the right marketing channel for you, you need to follow the step 2 above in its fullest sense and spend more time at that step than anyone. This helps you to better understand your target audience and thus helps you to choose the right marketing channel.

4. No Adequate Resources: The right marketing management is very much needed to make your marketing campaign successful. This includes allocating right resources like man power, budget and knowledge. You need to have enough people with right knowledge to help you execute your marketing campaign successfully. There are number of individuals and companies offering these services and you need to some market research to find the suitable one for you. Also the budget is very important for any marketing campaign. The allocation of funds depends upon the scale and complexity of your campaign consisting of different marketing channels. You need to take into consideration many factors like demographics, channels and duration of the campaign.

5. No Follow-up: It is often observed that people tend to take light once the campaign is over. I believe that the real action starts here because as the customers will be taking notice of your products or services, you need to be ready to clear their concerns, respond to their questions, following up on the leads and providing the right kind of customer service. You need to read my post on 6 ways to improve your customer service.

What other factors do you think that makes a marketing campaign fail?. Did you ever do a marketing campaign for your products or services and what are your experiences from them?.