Design with a conscience

The 18th edition of the Stockholm Design Week took place on the 4th of February this year, during this week, an array of events can be enjoyed across the Swedish capital by designers, critical…

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Avoid these 4 deadly marketing sins?

The devil has a pretty good afterlife opt-in rate… he must be using the four tips included below!

Do you know what’s crazy?

Over the past few months, I’ve been on the phone with a number of local business owners. Most conversations revolved around their marketing. Along with how they attract potential clients and customers and so on.

One phone call stood out more than all the rest. I won’t spill the beans on the business or what they sold. Anyway, it’s unimportant, most businesses, no matter the industry repetitively make the same mistakes.

They say you learn best from your mistakes. Well, I have a treat for you. You get to learn from this mans errors.

As you may know, I’m all for simplicity. It’s not that big and complicated do not work. It’s more to do with making things unnecessarily hard for yourself.

When it comes to marketing… the goal is making sales.

The process or how you make those sales. It’s not important.

Think about it this way. Say you have a cake to bake. You never baked a cake in your life. Until today, that is.

How many small business owners would approach the problem. They would search Google for a simple cake recipe. Gather a list of ingredients. Head to the shop and buy all that’s needed.

Later in the evening, the baking begins. There’s a mess everywhere. Even though the process is laid out step by steps. It only takes one slight error to mess the whole thing up.

Whether it’s not mixing enough. Baking too long. Wrong temperatures in the oven. Leaving out a key ingredient.

When you take this route. Your goal isn’t actually to bake a cake. You’re trying to replicate the pros.

It’s the same in marketing. You don’t need complicated.

Functional is more than enough. Who cares if it looks ugly once it makes money… or at the very least… doesn’t lose any money.

If you want professional results from your own work. Be ready for plenty of hand on experience. Sometimes, by following the instructions, things may work out.

The problem stands, if anything goes wrong, you’ve no instruction manual for troubleshooting. You’re on your own.

Listen, I’m not trying to fill you with fear. Your primary job as a business owner is to draw in leads and sales. Simply put, without either, you’re business won’t survive very long.

Returning to the cake example. If it was my first time making a cake. What I’d do is rock up to the shop. Buy one of those cake pre-mixes and whatever extra ingredients are needed and just follow the instructions.

With less moving parts. The odds of success are far higher.

Marketing is the same. There are no bonus points for making it complicated.

Reduce everything to the bare essentials. Then use and abuse these tactics until they stop working.

Let it be known. Every ounce of your online presence needs to go towards building an email list. I’ve mentioned many times before why. Read through some of my other material if you want to know the numerous advantages.

Enough cake talk and let’s get down to business.

The phone call I mentioned earlier. The one with a local business owner. We got talking about the paid traffic strategies he was using,

Online there are two major players in paid traffic. Facebook and Google Adwords.

He said,’’ I tried Facebook ads but saw no success. To be honest, I didn’t look into it a whole lot.’’

My reply, ‘’Okay, not a big deal. Tell me about your Google Adwords success?’’

That’s when I heard a little hesitation creep into the conversation. His response was,’’ Ya, I’ve been using Adwords for over a year. I’ve been sending traffic to my website. In fact, I have the same ad running for over a month now.’’

We were getting closer to the problem. Not quite there, but closer.

I said,’’ Right, we’re going in the right direction here. Tell me, what kind of numbers are you seeing form this campaign?’’

He goes,’’ Right now, I’m paying close to two euro per click. I’m not too sure how many sales or signups we made as a result though.’’

Now red flags began to pop up. The core of the problem was appearing, so naturally, I pushed on by asking,’’How much have you paid Adwords over the past year?’’

The response came with a hint of embarrassment,’’ Close to ten grand.’’

The only reply that sprang out of me was,’’Ten grand… what? and you don’t know how much this returned… and you’re still paying them money each month?’’

I get it though. Sometimes it’s easier to avoid the truth and the facts.

I’ll say it loud and clear. If sales and marketing are not a priority, you’ll more than likely continue to struggle.

After the call. I checked out this guys homepage. The destination where his paid traffic was being sent. The copy was generic, it lacked any call to action and the headlines were bland (like that cake we baked above.)

So what’s the lesson, my friendly reader?

1) Don’t’ send traffic directly to your homepage, unless you’re sure and know for certain how many people convert.

Even then, home pages aren’t optimised for persuading readers into a specific action.

2) Know your numbers. Pouring money into a failing campaign will never fix the problem.

In the situation above, if he decided to carry on as is. My advice would be straightforward. Stop paying for marketing or stop doing it yourself. It’s clearly not worth it.

3) The medium is useless — unless you know the audience first.

4) Bad advice and know-how cost more than professional advice. Most of the free information online is untested and based purely on opinion or speculation.

Trying to cut corners on such a vital part of your business. It will cost you far more to guess than pay someone who knows the dealio.

The biggest cost of all — is the wasted resources and opportunity by running an inefficient campaign.

If you learned anything of value today. Do me a favour, scroll down, hover over the ‘applause’ button and while you’re there — click on it!

Design with a conscience

Avoid these 4 deadly marketing sins?

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