MARKETING Biggest Marketing Mistakes: We asked leading marketers about the biggest marketing

Hijack the famous Got Milk? campaign. Early in my career I was given the opportunity to launch a local milk company in Arkansas and I hired a very well-known advertising agency to help me out. One of their strategies was to create an ad that would piggyback on the Got Milk? campaign, but instead of talking about milk, it would talk about car windshields and how you could get yours free if you bought a bottle of milk. I thought this was brilliant. The agency thought it was dumb. I kept pushing them for more, but once they saw the budget I was working with, we quickly parted ways. It was all downhill from there. The ad ran for a week or two, at which point I had to refund all the customers who hadn't read the fine print about having to buy a bottle of milk with their order in order to receive a free car windshield.

 

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Matt Bentley, Marketing Lead, SaaS.Group

 

A friend of mine had a client, a game developer who insisted on using controversy to sell his game, citing games like No Man's Sky and Star Citizen. The plan was to trick his fans into thinking he had built multiplayer into his game and offer influencer-made YouTube reviews, then use the resulting confusion to propel his game into virality. Appropriately enough, the announcement date was April Fool's Day. The result? Embarrassment and disaster. The client ended up spending his entire $6,000 marketing budget on an April Fool's Day prank that was funny for maybe 5 minutes. The game was shelved and will likely never leave early access, and the developer had to leave the team once he ran out of money. The moral of the story is that cheap controversy does not work. It's a much better use of your time and money to be honest and truthful to your audience which you build and engage with over time.

 

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Hosea Chang, COO, Hayden Girls

 

Wishing I were a Micromanager: One tactic we have tried is outsourcing marketing. In theory, and sometimes in practice, it’s a great idea. However, if you are going to outsource marketing, you need to have an in depth conversation and overview with them on what your company is, what you approve of, and what you do not approve of. As you move forward with them, you need to monitor what they do for you. At first, we took a hands-off approach, like we do with our team. We’re hands-off in the sense that we’re not micromanagers. We trust our team to complete their responsibilities. We’re hands-on with our team and staff in the sense that we are there to support and, too, are working hard, but we’re not going to double check everything that our staff is doing. The difference between outsourcing and managing a staff is the staff knows the flow of our business. Outsourced teams do not see what the day-to-day looks like, and so they have a few more holes in how things work. Anyway, long story short, the outsourced marketer claimed we did something we do not, in fact, do. It made me realize that though I am paying them for work, I still need to monitor their work, even a little more closely than I do my team, to ensure they are promoting the truth about Hayden Girls.

 

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Kathleen Dos Santos, Digital Marketing Coordinator, Soundstripe

 

One of the most common problems that I've come across in digital marketing in an agency-environment is lack of good creative. One of the worst cases that I've seen was with a previous ecommerce client. They had unlimited ad spend (ROAS target based) and wanted to push a ton of spend behind a YouTube video that they put practically no budget into creating. The voiceover was a robot, there was no music, and they were literally just showing slides of products. Being in an agency, we didn't have control over the creative that our clients decided to use to represent their business, so we had to try to make it work. We tried everything from different bid strategies, audience targeting, placements, etc. and just could not get this video to convert. Eventually we were able to convince the client to get a voice over for the video, and their team added in music they liked. We went from getting no conversions to it being our best performing video. We spent the rest of the quarter split testing things like male voice overs vs female voice overs, different music genres with different audiences, etc. and wound up turning YouTube into a legitimately profitable channel, which was a huge win. The thing with digital marketing is that the industry changes so quickly. Sometimes the most efficient way to learn is to fail. The best advice I've ever been given was that It's important to fail, and as long as you fail forward, you will find success in failure. I've learned the importance of a user's experience while interacting with ad creative, and am excited to now work in-house with a company that focuses on helping brands create content they can really be proud of.

 

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Laura Fuentes, Operator, Infinity Dish

 

As a long time business leader who has worked on many marketing campaigns over the years, I can say with confidence that many have flopped. When I first started my career, I worked at an up and coming marketing agency dedicated to finding the most innovative and unseen marketing strategies of the digital age. Not all of our projects were successful, and there were a few that were even dreadful. One of the worst was a marketing campaign for a local grocery store who wanted to reach new audiences. My team came up with the idea to blast music from the entryway of the grocery store in order to attract people passing by. Our song choices were awful and our speakers were tingy… and it soon became apparent that nobody wanted the harsh echo of a hard rock band of the early 2000s when they entered a grocery store. I have learned a lot since this experience and am happy to say that the best marketing campaigns I have been a part of were made possible because of a lesson learned

 

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Jeff Neal, , The Critter Depot

 

We tried some guerilla marketing and tried going viral by mailing live crickets to celebrities and politicians. We sell live feeder insects  to reptile owners. And we though that we could try and generate some buzz when popular celebrities or politicians made the news about receiving crickets in the mail. We shipped about 25 orders, and didn't get any feedback at all. It ended up being a big waste of crickets, labor, and packaging material.

 

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Malte Scholz, CEO, Airfocus

 

One common mistake I’ve noticed in the past couple of years is the prioritization of quantity over quality. Businesses chase new followers or a better ranking and they are willing to throw all kinds of ads just to improve metrics. In the short run, this strategy may provide some results. However, after some time, people will become tired of seeing one brand everywhere. When you add poor content quality, this tactic can have a reverse effect. Businesses may reach a lot of people but if they don’t have a quality campaign, this may push people away and cause serious backlash. I have seen a few companies who made the mistake and it took them a long time (a couple of years even) to get back on track and build reputation.

 

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Daivat Dholakia, Director of Operation, Force by Mojio

 

A marketing fail I can't stop thinking about is Burger King's attempt at levity on International Women's Day this year. Burger King's UK division tweeted, Women belong in the kitchen. They followed it up with additional tweets about how women weren't well-represented in the professional culinary industry, but the joke didn't land. It read as misogynistic rather than the funny, slightly subversive angle they clearly thought they were taking. After thousands of people flooded their account with angry replies, Burger King deleted the tweet and issued an apology. In marketing circles, that tweet already become a classic what not to do of social media management.

 

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Thao Tran, Founder, Voltcave

 

For the launch of our PC gaming media business, we worked with vendors to acquire some computer products that we thought would attract our perfect target audience. Keep in mind this took months to coordinate. While we were able to jumpstart our email list from 0 to over 1500 subscribers, many of them ended up being poor-quality leads. It turns out even if you're very targeted with your giveaway items, there will still be many people who sign up only for the free stuff. All of the time spent coordinating with manufacturers and shipping costs weren't worth it in the end. Perhaps I'll try a giveaway again in the future to engage my existing audience but I wouldn't recommend it for growing one from scratch.

 

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Dan Bailey, President, WikiLawn

 

Last year we attempted a marketing campaign on TikTok. Obviously, this platform was all the rage in 2020 and many companies were getting in on it. We knew it likely wouldn't be a good fit for us--our videos aren't meant to be humorous, and we can't convey a lot of educational content in so short a time. However, we invested in said content and in funneling advertising to it. The goal was that we could then nudge people toward our mailing list. After a 3-month period, we'd only gained about 50 new subscribers, paying close to $30 per signup. This was, needless to say, an astronomical number for us and not at all sustainable.

 

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Liz Hilton, CEO, KNITit & Swaddellini

 

What marketing strategy doesn't work? Influencer marketing! It sounds great doesn't it? Someone with seemingly direct access to your target market talking about how amazing your product is and getting a discount code or promotion right into the hands of the customers most willing and ready to buy! But that just simply is not how it works. It is very rare to generate sales from influencer marketing. The only value you can expect to get is brand awareness at best and absolutely no exposure at worst. Influencer marketing is great for a product that is new to the market and needs to establish a presence for itself and a digital footprint. But as a means for marketing and generating sales? Absolute waste of money.

 

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Abby Ha, Head of Marketing, WellPCB

 

I have to admit, I've tried some crazy things and some things have failed miserably.The one that stands out the most is a misguided attempt to target the Hispanic popula