Every year you read "Top Ten" lists of the best things that happened during the year. Who won which
awards, or broke what records.
In marketing it's just as
important to know what went wrong.
No web site is perfect, but
there are some mistakes you just can't afford to make. Look at your
marketing after reading this and ask yourself if any of these fatal
mistakes look familiar.
It's a common belief among
many traditional companies that they can jump right to the top of the
charts with a massive, one shot media blitz. Despite what your
advertising sales rep says, it's probably not a good idea to spend your
entire annual marketing budget on one Super Bowl ad. ;-)
If you do try this approach,
you'd better get it right the first time.
Long lasting success is built
by developing familiarity, confidence, and constant targeted exposure. A
"lightning" approach is forgotten as quickly as it
came.
9. Brand(ing) X
You see the same cool banner
everywhere. Whirling letters, and cool cyber-images. The "good" ones
evoke some emotion. But they tell you nothing about the company's
products or services, and they don't ask you to DO anything.
This is traditionally called
"branding." This kind of branding is nearly useless, and it's too
expensive for any but the largest companies.
It's also unnecessary. You can
get branding as a free bonus with your direct marketing if you do it
right. Further, to build a powerful brand online, give people great
products that solve their problems and excellent customer service that
makes them remember you enthusiastically.
This is *much* more effective
than traditional branding campaigns.
8. Bannerama
Bonanza
(Also called "The attack of
the fifty foot home page.")
Someone's promotional efforts
have paid off. You click through to their site, but ... wham! All you
find are a zillion more banner ads! Banners for everything from casinos
to health food. But you see nothing about why you went to that site in
the first place.
Do you stay around? Do you go
back?
No!
Guess what? No one else does
either.
7. Billboards 101
"Dot coms" are wasting a huge
amount of money advertising on Interstate and Freeway
billboards.
Most billboards on Highway 101
from Silicon Valley to San Francisco now feature a "dot com." These
billboards - which recently went empty for months at a time - now go for
up to $70,000 a month!
Unless you've got something to
sell to these commuters AND you can communicate your message on a
billboard, this is an incredible waste of money. Spend your advertising
budget where your customers are.
You can do a lot of targeted
direct response advertising for $70,000 a month.
6. Would You Like Spam With
That?
Yes, people still do this. (We
use the word "people" here in its loosest sense.)
Whether it's sending notices
about your latest bulldozer offerings to people who ordered a screen
saver, or mass mailing ads for your latest widget to addresses you
scraped from newsgroups, it's going to be trouble.
Spam is probably the most
dangerous and least effective advertising technique going on the net.
You can do yourself more harm with this than with any other
approach.
Don't.
5. "Send in the
Clones"
"Me too" is annoying in
emails. In marketing, it's fatal.
It doesn't matter if you have
the best product in the world if everyone else has the same thing.
Failing to develop a unique selling proposition for your business is an
extremely common mistake.
Find a way to differentiate
yourself from the rest of your industry.
Unless you want to be Chairman
of the Bored...
4. Hide and Seek
Someone visits your site and
can't easily find what they came for. For example, your promotion was
for a particular product, but the visitor winds up on your home
page.
Do you think they're going to
spend a lot of time trying to find what they want, especially when it's
buried 5 layers deep?
'Buh'-bye...
3. "Welcome to Bob's Homepage!" blahbahblahblah...
So what?
People who wouldn't consider
marketing without good headlines offline will do it on the web without
thinking twice. This is a shame. If they did think twice, they'd know
how silly it is.
Once your page starts to show
in a visitor's browser, you have about 5 seconds to get their attention.
("I haven't got all minute, you know!") ;-)
Good headlines give people a
reason to keep reading. They help get attention, and they break up the
text into logical pieces. Titles are what a visitor sees in some of the
search engines, and they're what gets shown if he bookmarks your
site.
Tell them what you're offering
right up front and watch your sales go up.
(For the record: "Bob's Home
Page" is NOT a good headline!)
2. Ready.. Fire!
Notice anything
missing?
Untargeted advertising is the
fastest way known to blow a budget and get no results. Know exactly who
your audience is, and market directly to them.
Ignore everyone
else.
And, the #1 Advertising
and Marketing Mistake for 1999 is...
1. Failing The Test, Test,
Test
It's hard to believe, but
there are a lot of companies who don't track their responses, and who
don't test various approaches against one another.
This is so easy to do online.
Don't neglect it. We've said it before, and we'll keep saying
it:
"Never spend a nickel on
anything you can't track."
![----------]()
Sites that make these mistakes
and don't correct them quickly are liable to be looking to sell their
domain soon as it won't be doing them much good.
Sure, you can get your name in
front of a lot of people real fast. But are they the right people, i.e.
your target market? You need a good system to market to these people in
order to achieve your advertising objectives. Online, anyone can get
"fifteen minutes of fame." (Just remember, those are Internet
minutes...)
If you're making these mistakes,
now's the time to fix them. If you're not sure, have someone go through
your site and test everything.
You might be surprised at how
THEY see your masterpiece. |
