6 Very Expensive Marketing Mistakes You Need to Avoid

Every business has a product or service worth promoting, but a prolific marketing presence should not be your main goal. A thoughtfully planned and well-executed campaign can easily outperform lazy, mass-media ad buys.

To save money, time and headaches, entrepreneurs eager to attract an audience and acquire customers at scale need to be wary of poorly-executed campaigns and advertisements done in bad taste that can cause more harm than good.

Examples such as Groupon’s 2011 Super Bowl commercial, Sony’s white PSP ads and Molson Coors’ college drinking campaign earned each company widespread public backlash and will forever haunt these brands. To be more effective at marketing, businesses must be mindful of embarrassing themselves and offending customers. Ultimately, bad marketing can be ruinous for customer loyalty and sales.

1. False promises negatively impact brand affinity.

Companies like Allstate Insurance, Avis Car Rental and RadioShack set themselves up for failure with their alluring taglines but poor service. While Allstate suggests, “You're in good hands with Allstate,” paying customers aren’t convinced. On ConsumerAffairs.com, the insurance company receives an average rating of 1.1 out of 5.0. Avis’ slogan, "We try harder," is similarly far from believable. It, too, maintains an abysmal rating of 1.2 out of 5.0. Prior to 2014, Radioshack touted, "You've got questions ... We've got answers." Unfortunately, its broken promises have awarded it a customer satisfaction rating of 1.4 out of 5.0.

Although a clever motto can be enough to motivate customers to walk into your store or visit your website, the experience you offer and the value deliver are what matter the most. Make only promises you intend to keep to effectively manage consumer expectations and improve customer satisfaction.

2. Bad data nets zero ROI for potentially profitable campaigns.

 Companies simply cannot afford to operate with bad data. According to Econsultancy, “New research from Experian Data Quality shows that inaccurate data has a direct impact on the bottom line of 88 percent of companies, with the average company losing 12 percent of its revenue.” In advertising, unique creatives are often tested against a control audience. In this instance, clean data might reveal that certain ads drive high engagement and positive ROI while others underperform. With the flip of a switch, data-driven marketers would then turn off the creatives that provide negative ROI and scale up spend on the high-performers. But without these sorts of insights, many marketers find themselves paying a fortune for traffic that does not convert. 

3. Inconsistent experiences confuse customers.

Different things make different customers tick. In a world where technology allows us to personalize every marketing touch point with consumers, many brands still fall short. Email blasts include links to products that are no longer available. Ad creatives direct audiences to unrelated pages on your site. At checkout, the coupon that should have automatically been applied to a purchase is nowhere to be found. Marketers need to regularly walk through the customer acquisition and engagement funnels to spot any errors or inconsistencies which may confuse customers and deter audiences from completing their purchase.

4. Aggressive email blasts affect deliverability.

For mid-sized businesses, email marketing offers a 246 percent return on investment. Yet, some marketers forget the importance of proper audience segmentation. An email blast to your entire list of subscribers may cause recipients, in droves, to mark your mail as spam. Of course, losing subscribers is the least of your worries. If you regularly receive complaints from recipients who mark your email as spam, your email service provider may temporarily disable or permanently delete your account. According to Campaign Monitor, “The industry standard for an acceptable percentage of complaints per email campaign is less than 0.02 percent.” Anything above that is cause for concern.

5. Marketers fly blind when they operate in silos.

Marketers sometimes find themselves operating alone and on their own terms inside a bubble instead of interacting with their peers to build a better product and increase overall customer experience. Marketers, for their own purposes, should reach out to their colleagues in finance, sales, customer service, product and engineering for valuable help and guidance. Marketers operating in a silo may not realize which products customers rave about most, which offerings have the highest (and lowest) markup, and tools or services that are currently experiencing bugs or downtime.

6. Marketing to desktop users neglects a larger, growing audience.

Most advertisements and creatives are built and optimized for a desktop audience. What many marketers forget is they leave money on the table when they fail to optimize their campaigns for mobile users. In the U.S., consumers spend more time on their mobile devices than they do on desktop computers. The future of marketing is mobile, as audiences have long shifted their attention towards smaller screens with lightening fast Internet connections. Marketers waste millions each year on desktop-optimized ads that are delivered to mobile audiences. Companies, instead, should prioritize developing mobile-optimized ads first, and worry about desktop traffic later.

by Firas Kittaneh, Entrepreneur

Email Is Still Relevant! Are You Getting the Most from Your Email Marketing?

In an era of mobile this and social media that, it’s easy to think that email — the original online marketing channel — is becoming ineffective. But giving the inbox short shrift is short sighted. After all, approximately 182 billion emails are sent every day, according to The Radicati Group. Clearly, your customers spend tons of time reading their email, so it only makes sense to put your message where their eyes already are.

That’s why, in a June 2014 poll by Internet Retailer, almost 40 percent of respondents said email marketing was their most important investment. Even more compelling: 90 percent indicated that email produces “a positive return” on investment.

Here are some key considerations to help you get the most from effective small business email marketing:

1.    Know Why You’re Emailing: Retention, engagement and revenue generation are the three most popular reasons business owners use email marketing. “Pick the one or two things you want to focus on first,” says Christopher Lester (no relation to the author), vice president of sales for email marketing company Emma in Nashville, TN. “Instead of a monthly newsletter, spend time creating an incredible three-piece welcome series. Do email marketing, but do it right.”

2.    Leverage Existing Relationships: Email marketing is most effective when you use it to stay engaged with customers and clients you already know who have opted in to receive emails, according to Robbin Block, creative marketing strategist with Block Media & Marketing in Seattle, WA. “That means they're interested in hearing from you, no matter what the delivery mechanism,” says Block. “Take the time to build a solid list. There are many ways to do that: sign-ups, purchases, registrations, networking, phone calls, trade shows, etc. Otherwise, it’s spam.”

3.    Make It Work on Mobile: Data from the Knotice Mobile Email Opens Report show that in 2013, 45 percent of emails were opened on a mobile device, usually a phone. “Marketers that aren’t making sure their email sends are optimized for mobile are really missing out,” says Carrie Hill, co-founder of Ignitor Digital in Glenwood Springs, CO. “One study suggested that mobile email will account for 15 to 70 percent of email opens, depending on your target audience, product and type of email. Email and mobile are a match made in heaven.”

4.    Personalize It: Use an email marketing service that enables you to add a person’s name to the message, because this kind of personalization makes it more effective. When recipients feel the message is targeted at them, “they’re more likely to engage with the message and click through,” Hill says. Take it a step further by gathering information like birthdays and anniversaries, so you can reach out on those days with a special message. “This is a great way to remind your customers you care about them in their day-to-day lives,” she adds. “I have local REALTOR® clients who watch home-sale transactions and try to gather email addresses of new homeowners via opt-in to market local home improvement products and services to them.”

5.    Make and Keep a Schedule: “The biggest mistakes small businesses make are not sticking to a consistent schedule and failing to measure the results of each campaign and apply those learnings to the next one,” says Abigail Stock, founder and chief digital strategist with New York City–based Little Digital Co. “An easy way to ensure you hit send on time — every time — is to create a content calendar and plan ahead for what you want to say to whom and when. A simple spreadsheet will do. If you have some extra time, get two or three emails done in advance and schedule them to go out ahead of time. That way, you don’t have the excuse of being too busy in the future.” Don’t forget to add time to review and analyze each email’s performance, too.

These small business email marketing tips apply whether you’re using email to send a newsletter, a welcome message or deals and surveys.

“Email marketing isn’t a silver bullet — no marketing channel is — but it is one of the best tools in your marketing toolbox,” Lester declares. “I think we’re past the point of convincing people to try email marketing. It’s not even an option anymore. Everyone is being marketed to via email.”

by Margot Carmichael Lester, Staples® Contributing Writer

The CEO of Okta, a $1.2 billion startup, tells us about his growing-up moment

Last week, Todd McKinnon the co-founder CEO of Okta, stood on stage in front of 1,000 of his customers and did something he had been wanting to do for years: unveil a better website.

When he began the better-website project, he didn't realize it would drag him through a series of exercises that he didn't want to do at all. But this process ultimately changed how he thought about his own company.

It was a growing-up moment for McKinnon as CEO of his 6-year-old, 600-employee company that's raised $230 million and was valued at $1.2 billion in September, The project started in February, he said.

"The marketing team came to me and said, we need to do a 'branding exercise.' and I thought to myself, what is that? Why do we need that?" The marketing team sold it to him as a project to build a new website, which he wanted. They hired an agency but McKinnon still really wasn't on board.

Someone from the agency came into his office to quiz him about his company. 

"We started this interview and I was pretty cynical about it and not very cooperative," McKinnon said. "And I was like, why do I have to tell this guy this stuff? We need a new website, can't he just do that? Do we really need to spend our time on a 'branding' project? Can't we just get a new logo? Can't we just get some new colors on the website?"

The agency had given him some references and one of them was his good friend and former co-worker, Tien Tzuo. Tzuo and McKinnon were early employees of Salesforce. Tzuo is the co-founder CEO of Zuora, another skyrocketing startup that's raised about $243 million and has about a $1 billion valuation.

Tzuo is also a really calm, chill dude, with a deep, radio announcer-like voice. He's the perfect person to talk a fellow CEO out of a tantrum. Tzuo told him that the process of having someone from the outside come in and tell you what your company is really about was fantastic for Zuora. 

So McKinnon played along.

"I didn't really hear much about the project for a few months. And then the team presented to me a progress update and it was a amazing. It wasn't a website," he said. It was a different way to look and talk about his company: "what language to use. Of course we also got into visuals and a new logo."

It made him realize, "We're now at a size and scale that they can't just get the essence of the company by talking to the founders. You have to do things at scale."

So now instead of telling everyone that Okta is a startup that does "single sign-on for cloud apps" he's now thinking of Okta as "the foundation layer for secure connections between people and technology." And while that new tagline sounds like the kind of marketing-speak that would come from a "brand" exercise, it really made McKinnon stop and think. 

The "challenge" for himself as CEO was to stop thinking of his company in terms of its first and most successful product, the one he and co-founder Frederic Kerrest created, which manages employee's passwords for cloud apps. Okta now offers a bunch of other stuff, too.  Growing up meant thinking bigger, but he also had to learn how to talk bigger. And for an engineer like McKinnon, he needed help to do that, even if he didn't think he wanted it. 

by Julie Bort

8 Reasons Why Your Marketing Sucks

If you ask 10 CEOs to tell you what marketing is, you’ll probably get 10 completely different answers. And get this. If you ask their marketing veeps the same question, you’ll get the same result.

Marketing defies definition. It confuses everyone, even those who do it for a living. I know that because that was my job in a former life, and I’m the first one to admit that I never considered myself an expert. Besides, my brethren could never agree on what their job titles meant. They were all over the map.

As I explain in my new book, Real Leaders Don’t Follow: Being Extraordinary in the Age of the Entrepreneur, marketing has always had a perception problem. It’s truly ironic that the field responsible for branding has a brand identity that’s about as unambiguous as Facebook’s 58 gender options. And yet we live in a commercial world where consumers and businesses make buy decisions based to a large extent on a field that nobody seems to understand very well, not even those who make big bucks doing it. Don’t you find that just a little bit unsettling?

Now you know why I quit marketing. I was tired of explaining to every CEO, board, and management team what marketing is and why it’s so important to the success of the company. I felt like Sisyphus, the sinner condemned to roll a boulder uphill, only to watch it roll back down, again and again, for eternity. I always wondered what I’d done so terribly wrong in a prior life to deserve that.

If you find marketing to be somewhat elusive, don’t feel too badly; you’re in good company. And while I intend for this to be instructive, not critical, there’s a very good chance that your company’s marketing sucks. Here’s why:

You have no idea what it is.

In his seminal book, Marketing High Technology, legendary VC and former Intel executive Bill Davidow said, “Marketing must invent complete products and drive them to commanding positions in defensible market segments.” I couldn’t agree more. And anyone who finds that confusing should not be running marketing.

It’s so easy to fake.

As VC David Hornik of August Capital says, “VCs like to think that they are marketing geniuses. We really do.” He goes on to say that they meddle in the marketing of their portfolio companies because “we can fake it far more convincingly than in other areas …” As I always say, marketing is like sex; everyone thinks they’re good at it.

You’re a follower of _____ (fill in the blank).

Marketing may be as much art as science, but it’s still a complex and nuanced discipline that takes a great deal of experience to develop some level of understanding or expertise. I don’t care if you’re intoPurple Cows or The Brand Called You, popular fad-like notions won’t get you there.

You’ve lost sight of the big picture.

In some ways, growth hacking is no different from traditional marketing, and I mean that in a good way. That said, I see a lot of businesses chasing lots of small opportunities or incremental growth improvements with no overarching vision, strategy, or customer value proposition. That, in my opinion, is a recipe for disaster.   

It’s built on flawed assumptions.

Most product strategies and marketing campaigns are built on assumptions that nobody ever attempts to verify because their inventors think they have all the answers. The problem is they don’t know what they don’t know. Never mind what customers say and do. What do they know?

You have an MBA.

MBAs may be good for something, but marketing is not it. I’m not saying marketing can’t be taught, it’s just that, in my experience, it’s better learned on the job in the real world. Davidow, Theodore Levitt, Regis McKenna – none of these innovators who literally wrote the book on marketing had MBAs. Maybe there’s a good reason for that.  

You’re not measuring the results.

Show me a marketing program and I’ll show you beaucoup bucks spent on a mostly “shoot from the hip” approach that lacks sufficient metrics to determine if it’s effective or not. If you don’t measure it, how do you know if it’s delivering a return on investment?

You’re a marketer.

One of the reasons for marketing’s perception problem is that senior-level talent is hard to find and few execs have the ability to articulate the importance of the function. And since CEOs tend to be a pretty cynical bunch, marketing has, to a great extent, been marginalized in the business world. Sad but true. 

Marketing is an enigma. It’s both art and science, creative and analytical, intuitive and logical, amorphous and tangible. It’s two sides of the same coin. That’s probably why it mystifies most. And yet, marketing is, without a doubt, among the most critical functions in every company. 

That may be a perplexing paradox, but companies that somehow manage to unravel the mysteries of marketing have a far better chance of making it than those that don’t. 

by Steve Tobak, Author and Managing Partner, Incisor Consulting