You plan the perfect marketing campaign. It goes off without a hitch, and your exact target audience immediately jumps on board. There are no last-minute changes, everything goes exactly as planned and you immediately experience the massive success you expected.

Yeah, right.

You’ve certainly heard about Murphy’s Law: whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. Marketing and advertising live in an organized chaos, and things will rarely go exactly according to plan.

Maybe you’ve developed a campaign for a special new offer, and two days before it launches your competitor announces a better offer. Or, you’ve created a massive promotion on Facebook days before Instagram launches a much more useful new feature. Your perfect plan might quickly become a huge bust, or worse, maybe it’s met with controversy.

So, what do you do when your plan descends into pandemonium? Read on for our tips on how to plan for chaos.

Embrace Uncertainty

Things are always going to change, it’s just a fact of life. If you want to overcome the changes and the chaos, you have to embrace uncertainty. You can’t be a leader or push for growth without dealing with uncertainty. If you play it safe, your content can start to look stale and boring, and you’ll be beat by your competitors who are brave enough to take risks. Have the confidence to know you can handle whatever chaos will come your way.

Anticipate the Crazy

Put yourself in the middle of the crazy, topsy-turvy world out there and consider your campaign from different perspectives. How many other people or steps are involved? Is there any room for miscommunication? What outside factors could potentially ruin your grand plan? For help on identifying outside factors, try using a focus group to test reactions, or use social media to soft-launch your new message before launching a major campaign. The more problems you can anticipate, the more you can prepare and plan for.

Create Processes to Ride with the Problem

Once you’ve anticipated some possible problems, you can create processes to deal with them. First, put processes in place to help you keep an eye on the campaign. Set aside time to monitor the data, track early responses and read comments on social media. Often, brands make the mistake of launching a campaign and letting it play out without any adjustments. If you don’t monitor your brand, you might miss complaints and controversy you need to address quickly.

Next, you need to create corresponding actions to take if (and when) the potential pitfalls you identified arise. Having a step-by-step action plan ahead of time will reduce your stress and panic in the moment. When the worst happens, you’ll feel more prepared.

Develop Solutions Quickly

Sometimes, no matter how many problems you anticipate, you’ll still come across issues you didn’t plan for. Once your plans start to derail, you’ll need to act fast. Taking quick, decisive actions will help your brand take care of the problem before it gets out of control. If it feels appropriate for the situation and your brand, you can even use it as an opportunity to lightly make fun of yourself or the problem. Audiences will appreciate your honesty and ability to laugh at your own expense.

Take Stock

Once the dust settles and the chaos has passed, recap what happened. Figure out what signs you may have missed and where things went wrong. From there, you can identify a better strategy and decide what you’ll do differently in the future. It’s important to fix the problem in the moment, but it’s even more important to learn how to prevent it from happening again. Everything is a learning experience, and you’ll never know what works (and what doesn’t) until you try.