Yes, you heard me right… UN-optimize them.

If you are like most companies with good marketing strategies, you focus on getting the right ROI, lead targets, and marketing demographics into your campaigns. You often start life casting a wide net – or a net determined by some basic industry standard.  From there, you run tests, A – this… B – that.  You build complicated SEO strategies that put the language on your sites into complicated architectures by which you say “these terms are gospel” to your copy strategies. You make changes to your homepages, high-level messaging, try to sub-segment the hell out of your existing leads when you remarket to them to hope you have pinpointed the sweet spot of pain. After every cycle, you go through a process of boosting what works, cutting what doesn’t and filling in new collateral, technology or designs to help bolster your next campaign.

If you are doing this, this is great and very important, but have you taken a look at where you are NOW from where you were when you dropped your first campaign?

• Has your product/service changed or added anything new?
• Has the market changed? Price points, demand or expectations?
• Have the “industry accepted terminologies” changed?  What was “hosted” yesterday, is “cloud” today.
• Has management staffing or vision changed?
• Is your audience now ready to absorb/share your message via social media?
• Has feedback the sales team has put in your CRM solution changed?
• Has the look and feel of your campaigns kept up with the times?
• Has the collection of new collateral, technology, or offerings you’ve created over time something you can now package and offer to a group you previously trimmed out?
• Has the last piece of collateral you have put out evolved so far, it makes your first piece look like a misfit?

An engineer friend of mine from days past said “I look back on a piece of code I wrote six months ago and I asked myself, ‘What the hell was I thinking writing that!?’”  As professionals, we take every day to grow and improve our skills and profession. His perspective is not that much different for us in Sales and Marketing.

Now, take a look at your campaigns with a fresh set of eyes.  Look at your current campaigns as if you were dropping, today, for the first time given the questions above. Do you find that you are currently in an OVER optimized state? Have you “mentally blocked out” options from a decision made 6-12-18 months ago, but no longer applies now? Do you see opportunities being left on the table because you have progressively filtered them out over time – not taking into consideration the some of the factors above.

I’m not suggesting you unplug every thing you’ve ever worked to optimize and start over again. This would risk your budget and your ROI. But selectively looking at every “optimization switch” you flipped over the past string of campaigns may enlighten you to some new opportunities you have previously filtered out.  We all get locked into the day-to-day and sometimes get too close.  “Etch-a-sketching your brain” from time to time may give you that fresh look at your work and “shake free” a few more opportunities from each of your campaigns that you would have previously excluded.

Please share this perspective with your manager AND your marketing lead gen team to see what they think. I’d be interested in their comments.