The heartbeat of digital marketing campaigns is the website, whether it be a corporate page, a specific brand’s microsite, or marketing landing pages. Marketers leverage social media and traditional marketing efforts to funnel potential customers to the website, convert those customers on-site, and tweak campaigns based on metrics pulled from the website.

However, technology has enabled so many capabilities for marketing that it can be overwhelming. After seeing and evaluating many digital marketing campaigns, there are consistently five technical mistakes brands make that can derail those campaigns:


1. Technology Impeding Time to Market

Time to market is one of the core measures of the efficiency of a marketing team, and obviously a delay in going to market means missing opportunities, resulting in revenue loss. A product’s time to market should not be delayed by a marketing team’s inability to launch a corresponding campaign. Marketers need to be able to launch marketing landing pages and microsites as they’re needed during a campaign as well. TTM should not be hindered by technology that marketing teams are using-- rather, it should be expedited by that technology.

2. IT Technical Deployment

Your software choices should make as much sense for IT as for the marketing team. However, this usually means that there is a compromise made where a software is not as robust as it should be for IT to do what it needs, which then leads to a vicious cycle of marketing demanding more from them as well. Software shouldn’t hinder IT from being able to deploy and meet TTM goals, just as with marketing.

3. Post- Deployment Agility

After pouring in countless hours of effort getting a website up and running, it’s easy to be sold on a solution that claims quick deployment. But what about after the website goes live? Marketing teams need the agility to create new content quickly as well as make changes such as broken links, perfecting their messaging, fixing redirects, and more. Without this agility, marketing efforts are stifled and customer experience on-site is significantly diminished.

4. Third Party Integration Mistakes

Of course, your website and analytics are not enough to successfully execute a campaign. There are other, third party integrations such as your customer relationship management, email marketing, or retargeting ad software that also need to be integrated seamlessly. And while integrating them effectively can sometimes be a challenge, vendor approval is just as important.

5. Effective Post- Deployment Access and Permissions

If everyone has access to everything in a campaign, it’s a recipe for disaster- there’s simply too many cooks in the kitchen. It’s important to assign specific user controls and permissions post launch. This ensures that your team can monitor and improve your campaign effectively. It also allows you to protect yourself from the intern breaking the site, which causes you to have to redo everything from scratch (yes, I’ve heard that story).


That’s it. It seems pretty simple and intuitive on the surface, but they happen more than you might think. When looking out for these mistakes, they’re certainly avoidable, especially at the stage when when teams are evaluating software options.


If you’re looking for help making those evaluations, feel free to reach out to me at [email protected] or @chloespilotro.