The Importance Of Getting It Wrong In Marketing

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Cheryl Ragland is Chief Marketing Officer at Spirent , where she leads Spirent's global marketing efforts and overall digital strategy.

In today's climate, everybody wants to be right. But it's sometimes more important in marketing to get it wrong before discovering the path that will ultimately lead you forward.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, from the perspective of how we use data in our marketing campaigns and the emergence of AI and its impact on seemingly everything we do.

I'll start with data. The amount we have in marketing today can be absolutely overwhelming . We're all so focused on the data points of total impressions, SEO rankings, cost per click and conversion rates that those metrics sometimes seem like goals in themselves.

They are not. Our role as marketers is to understand the issues our customers face in their own businesses and then remind them of the benefits our products can offer to help them solve that problem.

This is why I say it's sometimes more important to be wrong on the path to getting it right in your marketing campaign. Before landing on the right campaign or integrated strategy, giving your team permission to fail can lead to unexpected, and ultimately successful, paths.

We help our clients stress test their systems before going live, and we constantly strive for new, innovative ways to reach customers where they are. As a predominantly B2B enterprise, that traditionally meant channels such as trade media, LinkedIn and industry conferences and shows.

But as the boundaries between B2B and B2C have blurred, especially after the pandemic, when personal and professional browsing habits converged, those avenues might not be the only or even optimal path to getting one's message to the people who need it.

We've recently been discussing other channels, including Instagram and even TikTok, to explore whether that might be an ancillary strategy to connect with people who could benefit from our technology. TikTok has more than 1.5 billion people on the platform globally and 150 million in the U.S. alone . Many of those users now skew older than the Gen Z following that made the platform famous.

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