Dealing with (the worst kind of) mistakes
Everyone makes mistakes, after all, we are only human. Some mistakes are private, some can be swept under the rug, and some are a little bit more public.
There was once when I was running for the bus and tripped (on flat ground), spilled my drink all over my white t-shirt, and then hi-fived the pavement with my face in front of maybe 30 or so people. I don’t even have 30 friends, and if embarrassment was a function of how many people knew, this incident would definitely be on the top 5 most embarrassing things I have done in my life. This incident was firmly in the category of mishaps. Mistakes carry with it guilt along with the classic “stay-awake-at-night-embarrassment” associated with mishaps.
And this very guilt makes dealing with the repercussions of your mistakes even more difficult than simply facing a few sleepless nights. Now, I have made a lot of mistakes in my young life. But I can safely say marketing mistakes are by far the worst.
Now, why exactly is marketing mistakes the worst? Well for one, the whole world knows about it because that’s the whole point of marketing, to publicize your product and service to everyone, making your embarrassment quotient really high. The worst kind of A+ you could get honestly.
On top of that, marketing is a job for a company that wants a spotless brand surrounding its product/service(s).
A mistake that is publicized to the world can affect your brand’s identity for ages to come along with revenue.
Case in point, Kendall Jenners Pepsi ad that faced a lot of backlash from the internet for trivializing important protests and police brutality. Read about it and why it didn’t work in this article.
If you work for a startup, like the one that I am working in, every little piece of marketing you do can have big impacts on your growth as a company including whether you survive or not. Which means every mistake you make, can have repercussions to the power of 10. The guilt you feel associated with potentially derailing your startup’s growth plan will probably give you years worth of sleepless nights.
But mistakes are inevitable. In a previous internship, I managed to shut down our entire blog account for spam. Blame that on my stupidity. Recently. I probably killed one whole tree because the website on our brochures was wrong and needed to be reprinted.
Mother Nature hates me. But what caused me the most anxiety was the most recent and definitely the most public mistake I have ever made to date.
The Story
Back in October, which seems so far away now that we are in 2019, we were in talks with IBM to offer $1,000 worth of credits to The Startup Buddy users if they finish the ‘Starting Up’ mission. And when it came through, we were all really excited because the possibilities were endless for our entrepreneurial users. You could even utilise these credits to use IBM Watson!
I spent almost a month preparing the materials to be disseminated which included social media posts and newsletters. There were technical changes to be made to The Startup Buddy to help with the giveaway as well. And because our mailing list is the largest in terms of numbers and conversion, we used it to kick off this giveaway. I made sure that the emails looked perfect and it was sent to our mailing list with thousands of people. Along with that, the giveaway was announced on our social media channels as well.
It was an amazing feeling being able to literally announce to the world something you have been working on for so long! And, I eagerly waited for the numbers to grow. 1 week passed, and the numbers didn’t really improve at all. With another week, I knew that the campaign wasn’t doing well, and started thinking about paid marketing.
And then realisation struck on a Sunday night with an email notification of a chat initiated by a user. He was confused as to why the button saying “I want $1,000 of IBM Credits” on the newsletter took him to an IBM site even though step 1 was to sign up to The Startup Buddy. My heart sank, and I swear if I was any older, I might have has a heart attack.
I realised I made a mistake. The link on the newsletter was wrong. Instead of taking the subscribers of our mailing list to our site, it took them to step 3 which was to the IBM site. I didn’t know what to do. Won’t lie, I wanted to cover up my mistakes from everyone (including my colleagues) for a split second and then some. But, I realised that would be the worst thing I could possibly do. And so along with being on the brink of having a heart attack, I started planning how to make this better.
Since the mistake was something others were unlikely to notice, I could have easily swept it under the rug and created a new email to be sent out clearly explaining how to go about things. Or… we could do own up to our mistake and apologize for the confusion caused. After a nerve-wracking discussion with my boss, we decided to go with the later. I even wanted to make it fun and I decided to publicly shame myself by posting an Instagram story of me melodramatically saying sorry. Nothing funnier than public shaming right?
The reaction to our apology was really good. Most of our users responded well and the campaign has been gaining plenty of traction. Save for one angry subscriber that decided to email us back to say that he would be unsubscribing. Won’t lie but that hurt my feelings… a lot. And I was expecting more backlash but amazingly that was the only one.
I think the most important thing I learnt during this whole episode was to have more faith in your audience. They aren’t as bad as you think they are. They understand that marketers can make mistakes, and they do forgive us for it.
If my account of our ordeal wasn’t enough, let me conclude by saying marketing mistakes sucks! But remember that with any another relationship, the relationship you have with your audience also thrives with honesty. And what’s the most important is how you learn from this experience. It’s never easy to check your own work. After all, it is your own work. After this incident, it has become a rule in my office that at least 3 people have to thoroughly check marketing emails before they are sent out. Same for any major campaign on social media.
And if you are wondering, you can still get the $1,000 worth of IBM credits! You just have to follow these steps. And I promise the links are right!
Step 1: Sign up to The Startup Buddy! Make sure to verify your account 💪
Step 2: Complete Mission Starting Up! Find it by clicking ‘My Missions’ in the side menu and then ‘My Progress’. Make sure to click ‘Complete Mission’!
Step 3: Follow the instructions on the pop-up and you are suddenly $1,000 richer in the best way possible!
And as always, if you make a mistake and need help from an expert mistake maker (and solver), I am a mentor on The Startup Buddy!
The Startup Buddy is SEA’s founder friendly Startup Accelerator. We provide step-by-step guidance through specially designed missions, mentors from around the world and curated content to help you with your Startup journey! Find out more at The Startup Buddy!
