Scary Stories to Tell on Zoom 1: The Curse of Draculad

The scariest holiday is just around the corner! That’s why we are taking classic horror tales and giving them a marketing twist. 

Share these with your teams, peers, and managers for a light-hearted scare and dead-serious advice to avoid becoming the main character in your own marketing horror story. 

"I Want to Drink Your Marketing Dollars!"

Fluffy’s Stuff, a direct-to-consumer (D2C) pet grooming company, recently moved their offices to the coolest spot in town: an old castle just on the edge of the woods. As they happily spruced up their new office with cute and colorful pet-related decor, no one was privy to the dark secret that blanketed the castle — a marketing vampire roams its cursed halls. 

😱With his magical hypnotic charm, Count Von Draculad manipulates the marketing team to set up campaigns that run forever, never optimizing or segmenting for intent. 

😱He signs them up for productivity tools (enterprise-level, nonetheless), then neglects to cancel after the free trial period. 

😱Little by little, the handsome Count gleefully drains Fluffy’s of its marketing dollars, until they can barely afford a booth at the town fair. 

Marketing Director: Vampire Slayer

Enter the newly hired marketing director, Vanna Hellsing, who is prepared to clean up this mess. She immediately conducts a marketing audit to identify where the company’s valuable marketing dollars are being wasted, from internal tools to paid media.

In the face of a transparent and comprehensive marketing plan to dismantle his efforts to disrupt the company, the Count shamefully slinks back into his shadows, where he lurks quietly until the next victim takes over the lease. 

Moral of the Story

Unmanaged marketing efforts — including abandoned websites, unmonitored social media, and forgotten ads — put the businesses in danger. Preventing your work from turning into a zombie requires commitment from the whole team to continually monitor, analyze, and adjust all plans and platforms to improve results. It’s not an easy feat, but necessary for successfully maximizing marketing dollars.

Here are a few practices to put into place on your team, starting today:

Conduct Regular Audits

Plans & Campaigns

You’ll want to set up some time for you and your team to complete a comprehensive review of your marketing plan every quarter, going over everything from business objectives to current activities, as well as identifying opportunities for improvement, strengths, and weaknesses.

Take the time to set up a more regular schedule to review performance. Consider a once weekly review but make sure to assess at least once a month. 

Website & Social Pages

Consider auditing your website (technical infrastructure, SEO, and UX/UI); inbound marketing efforts (content distribution, calendar, and optimization); and paid media (targeting, bids and budgets, segmentation, and creative). 

Ultimately, take the time to ensure your digital efforts align with target personas and buyer journey stages. Conducting regular audits is a great way to re-allocate your limited resources to areas that need the most TLC. 

Cut What You Don’t Need

Tools

Cancel any underutilized or irrelevant tools. Seems like an easy task, right?

It may be hard to believe, but on average, businesses use an astounding 91 marketing services. Yet, only 13% of marketing executives say they are confident that they are maximizing their data using existing systems and processes.

Learn how to conduct a MarTech stack audit here.

Trust us when we say that you don’t need an overflowing marketing toolbox to manage all your competing priorities. Remember: Less is more, which means it’s time to let go of those pricey subscriptions and tools that your team never uses. 

Monitor & Measure

Pick Your Metrics

It’s easy for marketers to be inundated with data. Google Analytics, for example, provides an overwhelming bucket of insights into site performance and customer behavior. 

To prevent data paralysis, invest in a paid tool that offers similar but more digestible nuggets of insights on a silver platter. Consider checking out the AdRoll Cross-Channel Dashboard. 

If you’re sticking with Google Analytics, consider zeroing in on these key metrics: average pages per session, breakdown of organic traffic from search engines, goal conversion rates, keywords ranked in Google, returning visitors, and organic traffic. 

Prepare for the Holiday Season Now

Halloween is just the first in line for a long queue of holidays coming up. Start preparing for the busiest shopping season of the year now! Check out our holiday guides below to start optimizing your end-of-year campaigns.

Don’t miss our next Scary Story to Tell on Zoom! Click here to start reading story two.

Last updated on October 27th, 2022.