The Time I Failed a Client

I will be the first to admit I HATE failure. It makes me sick. I fight hard to be successful, yet this time I failed and it’s been a hard, huge pill to swallow. Let me explain…

I have a client who I really enjoy working with. They know what Twitter is and they are not too demanding. I’ll call this client Pacific. Pacific owns a business that has at least 5 competitors in their metro area. It’s a discount-deal type of business. One you would THINK would be wildly successful on social media. One of the owners was convinced before they ever hired me that this wouldn’t work for their business but knew they needed to try. Knowing that going into this, I made it my mission to prove him wrong. I don’t fail. I was going to get this to work.

Boy was I wrong.

We were successful in growing the number of people in their Facebook and Twitter communities and getting people to click on the links – they just didn’t purchase once we got them there. We tried everything we’ve ever had success with for other clients – contests, advertising campaigns, targeted posts, targeted tweets, private messages, emails. You name it, we tried it.  Nothing stuck.  The contests were amazing – a $100 restaurant gift certificate? Sweet!  A week at a beach house? Even sweeter! Hardly anyone entered either contest. Talk about being frustrated.

As a result, I’ve come to the following conclusions…

1. As much as social media marketers try convince everyone, social media is not for every business. Some businesses truly do better with just email marketing… or just blogging… or even traditional marketing.

2. You will never be 100% successful in business. I knew this from the get-go but when you have your first let-down or failure, it sucks. Run from anyone who tells you otherwise.  Everyone has failed at some point. Everyone.

3. You got to learn from failure and move on. There’s no sense doing the whole woulda-coulda-shoulda dance. Look at the situation and learn from it. Try to find the things that did work and focus on that. Then move on.

Yes, this is a very candid post, but I want you to learn from my failure. Not everything is going to work for every client. Some will be harder than others. Some will fail.

Share with me, have you ever failed?  What did you learn from it?

Never let success get to your head. Never let failure get to your heart. – Anonymous