Working in the field of digital marketing for about 15 years, I have come up against a lot. I am gathering here some of the main reasons for social marketing campaign failure, so let’s dig right into it.
1- Poor Research
One of the main reasons for campaign failure is rushing into the preparation and execution steps without a deep analysis of the market, buyer persona, customer behavior, competitors…etc.
“If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.” Albert Einstein said
2-No Clear Objective
Starting a campaign without a SMART objective is just like “shooting in the dark”.
Some marketing managers jump into digital marketing because they have a budget that should be spent or maybe it is a mandate to be online and do campaigns!
Once I had a brief from a product manager with an objective: “our company is going digital and top management is asking us to go for digital initiatives” … It is obvious that this is not an objective!
3- Wrong KPIs
This problem usually appears because of a vague objective. So, once you determine the objective, choose the relevant KPI’s
It is invalid to look for impressions if the campaign objective is app installs or website traffic.
Reach is not the precise KPI if you are aiming for conversions and sales!
4- Choosing the Wrong Channels
Some marketing managers choose digital marketing channels based on their own preferences.
For instance, those who love Instagram want to go for it and others like Snapchat so they believe it’s the best while these channels might not be rich in their target audience.
Another mistake is to depend on top-level numbers that might be misleading, for example, based on raw stats, Facebook has a high penetration rate in Saudi Arabia, however, local Saudi users are not active on it at all, you can only find expatriates like Egyptians and Indians.
5- Focusing Only on The Buzz
Many campaigns have made buzz while they left no brand recall at all. People might like the ad and designs, yet they miss your brand name, key message, and call to action.
It’s not just about engagements, let me tell you that people love engaging with memes, will you post jokes and memes just to get some likes and shares? this is a complete fail. I have come across some brands that fall into this mistake.
6- No Consistent Brand Voice
This challenge appears significantly during shifting from an agency to another, sometimes it takes place upon changing the community manager with the same agency.
As a brand, you have to be consistent. How you communicate with your audience. Are you humorous or serious? Do you go for slang or formal language?
7- Caring About Quantity Over Quality
Imagine you have a product made for class A+ and its ads are running to classes A, B, and C, you get millions of engagements and clicks, most of them are from people who will never buy your product.
A campaign with 10 USD CPC with precise targeting might be much more successful and cost-effective than a 0.1 USD CPC with broad targeting.
8- Creative Catchy Posts and That is It
Some creative agencies convince marketers that it is all about grabbing people’s attention who are flooded with hundreds of posts every day. This is partially correct.
Surely, grabbing attention is mandatory for a successful campaign, nevertheless, it’s not the only factor. Other factors are also important such as having a clear key message and a call to action.
9- Bad Community Management
A late response can affect a campaign’s performance. As per a report published by “Conversocial”, 37% of consumers who use social media to complain or question brands expect to get a response in under 30 minutes.
One of the bad community management practices is replying to different comments with the same reply which I call it “copy-paste community management” without any customization.
People like to feel they are appreciated by having personalized replies and this takes the customer-brand relationship to the sky.
10- The More You Post … The More You Get Results
Determining the frequency of posting is multifactorial; you might waste your budget producing content that is not seen by your audience because you allocated most of your budget to content creation.
Think of it as an archer, content is merely the arrow that needs ads to fly. Make sure you craft it well then throw with the maximum power you can. It is better than having tens of arrows while you throw them weakly.
I shall add that if you create a really interesting shareable content, people will throw that arrow for you when it goes viral, so I would suggest working smart not hard.
