5 reasons why marketing projects fail
There are many reasons why an internet marketing campaign might not be successful. Here I’ll share with you my experiences, so hopefully you can avoid the same problems.
Lack of senior-level buy in
Almost anything you try to do within a small-medium business will fail if you do not have buy-in from your superiors. This failure can appear at different times throughout your project, from a lack of freedom to investigate the viability of a new initiative, to having budget pulled just when you are about to set everything live. Whenever it happens, it’ll have you pulling your hair out.
What to do about it:
You MUST have senior-level buy-in before you invest significant time on your projects. Believe me, any time you invest in getting your boss on-board will be worth it in the long run. Take time to create a document outlining:
* the potential benefits of your initiative,
* the risks involved (you are a conscientuous project manager after all, right? You know that not everything will go smoothly.),
* the costs (in terms of the three M’s of Manpower, Money and Minutes (time),
* industry stats or third party analysis on why others find this project to be worthwhile.
You might have to overcome specific objections here, so be prepared to fight for your cause. I have had to overcome the fears my FD had about PPC being ‘just too expensive’. Unless you have a worthwhile argument, your project might be on the back foot before it has even begun.
You don’t have any goals
In fact, you need more than just *any* goal. You need to have a goal that have a difinitive link back to a business goal. Why do you want to have an additional 100 Facebook followers within 3 months? Why do you want to rank in the top three for ABCKeyword?
Starting a Facebook campaign or creating an SEO strategy is hard work and if you don’t know where you are heading, you will never get there. As Kenichi Ohmae, the Japanese Business Strategist stated, “Rowing harder doesn’t help if the boat is headed in the wrong direction”.
What to do about it:
Simple: work out what you want to achieve and why you want to use that medium to achieve it. You need to know what tangible benefits 100 extra Facebook followers or a top 3 ranking for ABC Keyword will bring you.
There is a lack of cross-disciplinary teamwork
It takes more than one team to execute a successful online marketing campaign. Are your designers and developers prepped for that microsite or bespoke landing pages you want to create? Are you copywriters ready to produce the additional content for your follow-up emails? Is your customer service team prepared for the inevitable influx of specific queries relating to your promotion? (After all, if attack is the best form of defence in football, great customer service is the best form of marketing an online business.) Has your compliance team had a look over that TV adverts you are planning to air?
If you do not illicit help from every relevant team-principle, you will fail.
What to do about it:
Enrol your key stakeholders involved early in the planning phase of any web marketing project. It is unfair to expect your colleagues to drop whatever they are doing because you have a campaign about to go live and you need their last-minute input. Make sure you let them know what you are planning early!
Inadequate skills to complete the task
As talented as you are Mr. Online Marketer, there are things you just won’t be able to do. While you can learn almost anything online these days, often it is more efficient to hire in additional help. You have to put a value on your time; you are an expensive asset to your business and you must be used in the most efficient way.
What to do about it:
Don’t be afraid to hire in help, either in the form of a freelancer, and agency or a permanent employee. You should be honest with yourself about your own skills, or that of your team, and you should do so early in the planning phase as additional help will undoubtedly increase the cost of the project or campaign.
Lack of monitoring and/or reporting
at campaign.Part of the beauty of online marketing is the speed at which you can tell if a campaign is working or not. While certain methods and techniques take some while to tweak, you can normally tell fairly quickly if a campaign is absolutely dying a death. That is, if you are monitoring or reporting on the performance of that campaign. Your marketing does not exist in a silo. It is a living, breathing entity that will be constantly changing. You must keep on top of it’s performance if you are to maximis your ROI.
What to do about it:
Build reporting metrics into your campaigns from day one. Also allocate sufficient time for a team-member to analyse these reports and for you to listen to what he has to say. The first crime is not analysing how your campaigns are performing, but it is just poor management to disallow your staff the time of day to report back to you with their findings.
For me, these are the most common reasons for internet marketing failure. One point I’ve yet to add, is that you must have the correct attitude to failure. You must learn from your experiences – you must learn from every mistake you make. Break each failure down and review it at a granular level. It was most probably one element of the campaign that failed so do not allow this to frighten you away from using this channel in general.
If you have any additional reasons for failure and how to avoid them, I’d love to hear about them in the comments section below.
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