Marketers love a gamble. It’s part of the job. You spend your time strategising, planning, and constructing, but after you hit publish you just have to sit back and see how it goes.

Sometimes it works as expected. Sometimes it doesn’t. And sometimes it smashes it out of the park and works far better than you expected. Which is great, but both the highs and lows can shade your thinking.  

If a particular marketing campaign or tactic worked tremendously well for you previously, you can get stuck on trying to recreate the same high only to be disappointed. You lose sight of the other possibilities.  

If you keep betting on black, eventually it’s going to come up red.  

In marketers anonymous, rather than the 12 step program, we take 6 steps to recovery:

1. Diversify. Platforms and people change. Social media platforms come and go in popularity, new channels get released, and old ones update to become less effective (I’m looking at you, Apple).
2. Experiment. Are you saying the same messages over and over? It can lead to message fatigue. Are you using the same ‘safe’ stock images as your competitors? Is your content built for mobile? Do your ads drive purchase intent? Mix it up, find a new way to phrase things, be memorable.
3. Explore new audiences: A recent talk I watched at AdWeek from Facebook highlighted the shift to broad targeting to grow your audience. Rather than thinking why certain audiences would NOT work, think of why they might. Scale-up your audience size to include new potential audiences. 
4. Automate. Sometimes you don’t need to work harder, just smarter. If you’re including your labour costs in your metrics (there’s that data again), you can bring your CPA (cost per acquisition) down just by automating some tasks. 
5. Become your most painful prospect. Who are they comparing you against in today’s market? Times change. i.e. Insurance brokers, mortgage brokers and financial planners are now competing with online tools. Are you more experienced than an algorithm? Only the developers know, so what else can you sell yourself on? Customer service? The guy down the road says the same thing. You may need to abandon old selling points and find new ones.  
6. Go back to basics. Say email marketing worked for you once but hasn’t lately. Look at the simple reasons for why things worked in the past. Maybe you had a small engaged list that has moved onto new interests. That doesn’t mean that email marketing won’t work again, you might just need to work on your list segmentation.  

So now that you’ve looked at what you could change, how do you go about implementing it?  

Like all marketing endeavours, it comes down to:

• Developing a clear brief for your team,
• Testing,
• Learning, and;
• Embracing new tools.