10 Things that Scare the BEGEEZUS out of Marketers

In the name of having some fun today, we’ve compiled a list of 10 things that we think scare the BEGEEZUS out of any marketer.

10. Stone Dead Links

It’s a calm afternoon at the office when you go to check on a link to your website and it’s dead. You have to figure out what happened, what the impact is and how to fix it. All of a sudden that super strategic blog post you were going to write seems like a distant memory…

9. Broken & Bruised Analytics

For many of us, the first thing we do in the morning while drinking coffee at our desks is checking on website and/or campaign analytics. It’s a great way to start to start the day until you log in and find there isn’t any data waiting for you. You’ve got no way of seeing how well (or poorly) your campaign and/or website is doing. There are a number of things that could have caused this but at this point, it doesn’t matter, because your head is about to explode.

8. Your Website is Six Feet Under

This is another one of those things that gets us right where it hurts. You’ll get an innocent looking email or a friendly phone call saying “Hey Dan, is our website down?” and you’ll immediately go to your browser to get that dreaded error message that tells you that something is indeed wrong. At this point, every marketer knows how the next few hours are going to play out. Support tickets, phone calls, more follow up… I get shivers just thinking about it. And that’s assuming you can get the website up without having to restore it from a backup (and I hope you always have a backup).

7. Email Marketing that Pushes Up the Daisies

I started my career in email marketing 18 years ago at a small company called FloNetwork. We were an email service provide that would deploy marketing emails for large clients. Since then, I’ve estimated that I’ve been involved in the deployment of over 200 million email marketing messages and yet my heart still pumps every time I hit the “send” button on an email marketing campaign. That’s because email is personal. You’re putting a message into somebody’s personal inbox. So, if you screw something up in email, there’s really no fixing it without having to send another email…

6. Campaign Launches

Marketers spend so much time planning and preparing for campaigns that it can be really stressful when a campaign finally launches. Some people are relieved when a campaign launches because their job is “done”, but I find it to be a really scary time – when you find out if all of the hard work you put in is going to pay off… or not.

5. Social Media Helpdesk of Horrors

If you’re lucky, you’ll never need to contact support helpdesk for a social media platform… because they don’t really exist. I hope you never get locked out of your account or that your business page gets shuts down on you. Good luck getting somebody on the phone to help you sort that out quickly.

4. Getting Blacklisted by Google

This really is the stuff of nightmares. You see a sudden drop in search traffic to the point when you are, quite literally, getting no organic search traffic. You do a few checks and get confirmation. Your domain has been blacklisted by Google. Now you have to figure out why, get it fixed and move forward… but it’s probably going to take a while.

3. IT People (aka The Sitting Dead)

The horror. The horror.

2. Going Viral

It’s a great meeting, lots of good ideas coming out about a new campaign idea and then somebody says “Hey Dan, can we make this go viral?”. This is usually the point in the nightmare where I wake up in a cold sweat with my hands around my own neck. Lucky for me (and most marketers) we don’t get this as much as we did in the immediate aftermath of the Ice Bucket Challenge but going viral is a result of careful planning, strategy and a bit of luck.

1. When Somebody Wants to “Pick Our Braaaaaaains”

Yes, we do love The Walking Dead but we’re actually talking about those times when somebody wants us to meet for coffee so that they can run an idea by us. When somebody asks me if they can pick my brain, I hear “hey, can you give me some free advice that I’m not going to take?”.

I hope you had as much fun reading this post as I did writing it… even if it made my skin crawl. Happy Halloween.