Why digital campaigns fail and how to avoid making these common errors
Managing a successful digital campaign is no easy feat. With many different components to consider and oversee, consistent problem solving and often a lot of task juggling is required to ensure everything continues to run as smoothly and efficiently as possible. Although in a perfect world every campaign would deliver expected (or better!) results, things can go wrong along the way. As it’s crucial to manage issues effectively and appropriately when they arise, here are a few common errors that can contribute to campaign failure and advice on how to avoid them.
Missed deadlines and scheduling errors
Every campaign plan should be considered, measured, and detailed. There’s a certain level of satisfaction to be had from the knowledge that you have taken your time to plan and curate a campaign targeted to help your business to achieve an important objective. However, it’s impossible to plan for every eventuality, which means that you will need a level of flexibility so that you have time to act and immediate access to the resources you will need to keep your campaign on track. 
Occasionally, last-minute obstacles will present themselves, derailing your initial plan, and necessitating reconsiderations to ensure everything is completed to the required standards. For this reason, holding regular team meetings where potential issues are flagged before they need urgent attention is key.
If your scheduling plans have been disrupted, it’s important to demonstrate agility so that you don’t lose any further time or miss any more crucial deadlines that might leave you treading the fine line between campaign success and campaign failure. If at all possible, build some scheduling leeway into your campaign plan, so that if unexpected issues do arise, you won’t find yourself having to perform miracles to deliver results.
Failing to consider every avenue early on
Imagine you’re reaching the end of a campaign and someone says, ‘we probably should have done X, Y, and Z’. Those avenues might have vastly increased the scope of your campaign, achieving even better results and boosting your ROI, but are now too late to act upon and seamlessly integrate into your approach.
Although it’s important to manage expectations, confirming that every team member’s perspective has been acknowledged, alongside ensuring the core aims of the campaign are kept at the forefront, will help you to explore an array of avenues early in the project. With this information in hand, you can then work to identify the best course of action. Ensuring every campaign is a genuinely collaborative effort will produce greater outcomes in both the short and the long term.
Unsuccessful risk management
Identifying risks before campaigns begin is imperative, which is why project managers must demonstrate an awareness of everything that might become an issue from the outset. Unsuccessful risk management leaves projects vulnerable to an array of problems throughout their duration, from impeding the smooth transition between initial concept and campaign release, to failing to identify the crucial foundational aspects upon which every successful campaign is built.
It is therefore imperative to assess a variety of factors, including whether any campaign components are particularly time-sensitive, whether the data you’re using has been fact checked and obtained from reliable sources, and whether alternative approaches might yield more positive outcomes.
If you feel that your digital campaign is failing then please get in touch and we can help you with our range of digital marketing services, please call us on 10642 927769 or email us for more information.