They say that failing is key to learning and growing, both personally and professionally. Yet some mistakes can derail a campaign in one fell swoop and result in the loss of several weeks of hard work. To help you avoid these pitfalls, here is a short list of mistakes I have observed in recent years.

Believing that if you build it, they will come

Whatever your campaign’s objective, its success will inevitably depend on the traffic it succeeds in generating. One of the most common mistakes is to create a microsite or landing page to develop your campaign concept, and then to think that a mere e-mail to your supporters will be enough to get things rolling.

While it’s true that supporters of a given cause are much more engaged than communities in any other sector, it’s extremely hard to mobilize a digital community without a good game plan and plenty of resources for e-mail reminders, community management and follow-up. In many cases, a media buying strategy may prove to be a much simpler and much more effective strategy.

Thinking that a single landing page will be able to convert everyone

The most common mistake I have seen is designing a campaign like this:

Several targets -> a few messages -> just one landing page -> several calls to action

We have more and more tools at our disposal to learn about our target markets, gather data, segment and measure the impact of our efforts. Maximizing the impact of those tools is critical. A good campaign must have a main objective that is clearly defined:

  • Acquire X e-mail addresses of new supporters
  • Acquire X new donors
  • Convert X existing donors into monthly donors
  • And so on

The next step is to determine, for each segment targeted in the campaign, the right message and the right conversion tactic to reach your objective. Not sure you have the right approach for your segment or the right conversion message? No worries, that’s what testing is for! Don’t hesitate to conduct A/B tests, and, please, make sure you have accurate performance metrics!

Putting all your eggs in the same basket

If you have never conducted a digital campaign or if your past campaigns have yielded average results, my last piece of advice is pretty straightforward. The first step might be to opt for an approach focusing on collecting data. Organizations with more limited resources than those in other industries believe wrongly that there is just one valid approach: to do nothing and then when you move ahead, go for a home run.

But before you try for a home run, make sure you’ve tested your message, your objectives and your tools in smaller-scale campaigns so that you can collect relevant data and establish useful benchmarks for your industry. Better yet, share your results with your partners and see whether it’s possible to pool your information to get a better grasp of your target market.

 

Still don’t know where to start?

At Atypic, we’re pretty sure that with our complementary team of dedicated experts under a single roof, we’re the only agency able to meet your cause’s many needs.

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