5 Not-So-Obvious Marketing Mistakes You Can Avoid

In the pur­suit of being more vis­i­ble and per­sua­sive at the moments when con­sumers are look­ing for us, mis­takes are bound to hap­pen. Avoid these.

Dave Davies By Dave Davies from Beanstalk Internet Marketing. Join the discussion » 0 comments

Albert Ein­stein once said that the only peo­ple who nev­er make mis­takes are the ones who nev­er try any­thing new. No such luck in mar­ket­ing. We’re always try­ing new things in an effort to be more vis­i­ble and per­sua­sive at the moments when con­sumers are look­ing for us. Some ideas work bril­liant­ly; oth­ers, not so much. While it’s great to learn from your own mis­takes, it can be even bet­ter to learn from the mis­takes of oth­ers.

We all know the sto­ries. Some of the biggest brands have made some of the biggest mar­ket­ing mis­takes – the ones that make the all-time lists. Like Coca-Cola launch­ing “New Coke” in the ’80s and M&M’s say­ing “no” to being the can­dy E.T. was lured by in the famous movie “E.T. the Extra Ter­res­tri­al”, allow­ing Reese’s Pieces to gain major mar­ket­share. But not all mar­ket­ing mis­takes made by busi­ness own­ers and C‑Level exec­u­tives are this obvi­ous. It’s for this rea­son they can have even more dra­mat­ic and dis­as­trous results. When a mis­take isn’t obvi­ous (or isn’t called out by fear­ful employ­ees) its costs and impact can plague a com­pa­ny for years. I’ve seen just about every mar­ket­ing mis­take that can be made. I’ve cer­tain­ly made my share of mis­takes (who has­n’t?), mak­ing me an expert in the field. What fol­lows are five not-so-obvi­ous mar­ket­ing mis­takes I’ve seen as a direct result of com­pa­ny own­ers and C‑suite direc­tives.

1. Focusing On One Term Or Idea

One idea

Ego dri­ves a lot of bad busi­ness deci­sions. It’s rarely as obvi­ous as in the area of key­words. This focus tends to be more exag­ger­at­ed in small and medi­um-sized busi­ness own­ers. It needs to be caught quick and stopped. What I’m talk­ing about here is focus­ing pri­mar­i­ly on “brag­ging rights” phras­es but it can also be a result of false-con­sen­sus bias (in oth­er words, the belief that we are the norm and oth­ers act like us). This ten­den­cy applies to both organ­ic and paid search. I’ve seen peo­ple wast­ing many thou­sands of dol­lars in paid search focus­ing on terms they believe are impor­tant and ignor­ing the lit­tle alerts telling them there are addi­tion­al phras­es to con­sid­er. With paid search a num­ber can be put to the loss, that might make it the least destruc­tive because in organ­ic it’s worse – it may result in forc­ing SEO’s to waste time chas­ing one or two terms you may nev­er get and ignor­ing the pletho­ra of oppor­tu­ni­ties that could be earn­ing rev­enue. There is one focus: cost per action. How much time or mon­ey must be put in for each con­ver­sion? That is the only impor­tant ques­tion and what­ev­er terms or organic/paid search strate­gies max­i­mize that are the ones that will give you your brag­ging rights.

2. Being A Perfectionist

Progress - Perfection

There’s inher­ent­ly noth­ing wrong with per­fec­tion. In fact, to say there is would be the antithe­sis of the word. And yet … If what you are striv­ing for is per­fec­tion you’re on the right track. If what you insist on is that things be per­fect before they can be used, then fail­ure is assured. It’s easy to get locked into paral­y­sis with tweaks and adjust­ments to any strat­e­gy such that it drags out a process and costs in missed oppor­tu­ni­ty.

A fre­quent exam­ple can be found with a web­site redesign (this phe­nom­e­non takes place all over mar­ket­ing, but design is the eas­i­est exam­ple). Your awe­some new design is ready, but there are just a few last minute changes. Then a few more. Then the design­er goes on hol­i­day for a cou­ple weeks. Then “hey, we should change this from Cerulean blue to Steel blue.” Then… you get where I’m going. The inter­est­ing part is that in 99 per­cent of the cas­es I’ve seen the site at the first “last minute changes” was 10x bet­ter than the cur­rent site. The con­stant changes can (and often do) drag out the launch for months, all the while los­ing sales to a dat­ed and inef­fi­cient old­er site where the new site could eas­i­ly have launched with tweaks still under­way and changes could actu­al­ly be inspired by ana­lyt­ics and not just (here’s the word again) false-con­sen­sus bias. The web is fast. Most times things won’t be per­fect. But things can be bet­ter than what’s there now, or bet­ter than what you did last time.

You’ll gain more from doing it than not. Some peo­ple call this “fail­ing fast” (though I hate the term). You don’t need to fail to learn; you need try to not be per­fect because that rarely hap­pens. Even if you achieve “per­fec­tion” on the first go, it prob­a­bly cost you a lot in terms of missed oppor­tu­ni­ties to accom­plish.

3. Together We Fail!

Often tied to the point above about per­fec­tion, though not always, is the “togeth­er we fail” approach. In today’s more relaxed work envi­ron­ments it’s easy to get led to believe that every­one should have a voice and that every opin­ion is valu­able. So let me ask this: when you were a teenag­er sit­ting around with a few friends and only enough in your com­bined wal­lets for a sin­gle piz­za, how long did it take to argue about what kind to get? Now, add in about a dozen more egos, make the deci­sion impor­tant for the wel­fare of your busi­ness, and we’ve got a poten­tial cat­a­stro­phe on our hands. Every busi­ness own­er ear­ly on has like­ly done this and learned fast the pit­falls. But if you haven’t … do. Some­one needs to be made respon­si­ble for a final deci­sion and a time­line to make it. It’s great to hear ideas. Heck – staff, cus­tomers, and folks on the street can have some great ones. But when it comes time to mak­ing impor­tant brand­ing, tech­no­log­i­cal, and busi­ness deci­sions, it’s time for the democ­ra­cy to end and the benev­o­lent dic­ta­tor to step in and make the final calls based on their expe­ri­ence. The alter­na­tive is a scat­tered mess of a strat­e­gy that leads to a scat­tered mess of loss­es.

Some­one needs to be made respon­si­ble for a final deci­sion and a time­line to make it. It’s great to hear ideas. Heck – staff, cus­tomers, and folks on the street can have some great ones. But when it comes time to mak­ing impor­tant brand­ing, tech­no­log­i­cal, and busi­ness deci­sions, it’s time for the democ­ra­cy to end and the benev­o­lent dic­ta­tor to step in and make the final calls based on their expe­ri­ence. The alter­na­tive is a scat­tered mess of a strat­e­gy that leads to a scat­tered mess of loss­es.

4. Leading By Anecdotal Data

Marketing Mistakes

We’ve all done it. We look at some data and make con­clu­sion based on it even know­ing as we do that the data is lim­it­ed. For exam­ple, one time I was run­ning an AdWords cam­paign and noticed that two weeks in a row there were two days that the cost per action was far high­er than was accept­able. If I could just trim those days out then the over­all CPA for the cam­paign would be awe­some. So I set­up some auto­mat­ed rules to drop the dai­ly bud­get on those days to one-third of what they were and gave the remain­ing two-thirds to the best per­form­ing days.

Fun­ny … it didn’t real­ly change the CPA much. Why? Because I’d basi­cal­ly only seen a small sam­pling of “what Mon­days are like”. Once more data was col­lect­ed a prop­er bid-adjust­ed strat­e­gy was devel­oped but it was not what I thought with a whop­ping two data points for each day of the week.

This car­ries into vir­tu­al­ly every area of mar­ket­ing. You see the search vol­umes for terms and assume big­ger is bet­ter because there’s more traf­fic. That’s one data point … then there’s con­ver­sions. I’d rather have half the traf­fic with a 3x con­ver­sion rate myself. Of course there’s also the anec­do­tal evi­dence of an expe­ri­ence.

It goes a lit­tle some­thing like: Busi­ness Per­son: We need to change the col­or of the blue wid­gets to red. Me: Why is that? Busi­ness Per­son: I showed the wid­get to my gar­den­er and he hat­ed it but would love one in red. Me: Is your tar­get mar­ket gar­den­ers who work for you? Busi­ness Per­son: No, but he’s a very bright guy. Me: But not your tar­get mar­ket. Busi­ness Per­son: Right. *crick­ets chirp­ing* Mar­ket­ing is an ide­al field to col­lect data, find sam­ples to test our assump­tions for a fee, run A/B tests, and so on. I learned from my les­son (and hope­ful­ly you will, too): wait until you have enough data to make an edu­cat­ed deci­sion.

The more data points, the more reli­able the data is. You first need to fig­ure out how impor­tant it is to be right on any spe­cif­ic sce­nario and then deter­mine the reli­a­bil­i­ty of data you need to accom­plish that.

5. Keep Up With The Jones’

I very often see busi­ness own­ers eye­balling their com­peti­tors try­ing to fig­ure out what they’re doing and copy it. There are sev­er­al not-so-obvi­ous issues here. But if a pic­ture is worth a thou­sand words, then let’s start with a core prob­lem with the log­ic, as told by Scott Adams:

Dilbert cartoon

Now, this illus­trates one prob­lem. If you copy, for exam­ple, their link strat­e­gy, you’ll be bas­ing your entire strat­e­gy on the data regard­ing the links they have. I have no prob­lem with com­peti­tor research, but if that’s all you’re doing you will always be one step behind which means you’ll always be a posi­tion behind as you’ll only know what they did pre­vi­ous­ly, not what they’re doing now. Anoth­er major prob­lem with this log­ic is that it assumes your com­peti­tors know what they’re doing. Many don’t. It also assumes you have the same resources.

I had a client who was in a com­pe­ti­tion against a com­pa­ny that had just raised $20 mil­lion in VC fund­ing. There was lit­er­al­ly no way we could pos­si­bly keep up with them on a dol­lar-for-dol­lar bat­tle. For­tu­nate­ly, they weren’t smart about their spend­ing in the SEO realm, which made it man­age­able (because we weren’t fol­low­ing their lead).

Had we tried to do every­thing they did, the com­pa­ny I was doing work for would have been bank­rupt with­in a few months. Be aware of what your com­peti­tors are doing, how they’re grow­ing their links, what con­tent they’re push­ing out, and con­ven­tions they’re attend­ing, etc. but don’t try to copy what they do sim­ply because they’re beat­ing you right now in the rank­ings. Fig­ure out what makes sense with the resources you have, take from your com­pe­ti­tion what you can, and add some of your own ideas.

Dave Davies

Written by Dave Davies

CEO, Beanstalk Internet Marketing

Dave Davies is the CEO of Beanstalk Internet Marketing. He writes with 15 years of experience in SEO and Internet marketing.

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