“One thing is certain in business: you will make mistakes. When you are pushing the boundaries, mistakes are inevitable – how you react is important.” Richard Branson
You learn far more from mistakes than successes – that can be quite a tough lesson to learn if you have built your career on doing things well, getting things right. Making a mistake in business can feel like a big personal failure and I think if you are a service business owner that brings a real worry about how other people are going to react and is it going to have impact on your business.
My marketing mistakes and a global fiasco
So this week I wanted to uncover a few marketing mistakes, from a cringe moment of my own to the biggest marketing fiasco in history. Hopefully these will make you feel a little bit better about any mistakes of your own!
30 years ago British domestic products manufacturer Hoover ran a promotion where they offered two free international flights with any £100 purchase. This fantastic offer is remembered as the worst sales promotion in history. It was created as an eye catching sales promotion designed to sell more vacuum cleaners. You might have already spotted the flaw in this one, but I’ll outline just how wrong it went!
Are you making these four marketing mistakes?
I round up four mistakes that many clients fall into:
1 – forgetting your current clients
2 – making it too complicated
3 – chasing the bright and shiny things (there are so many!)
4 – being inconsistent in your marketing
I’ll explain why these are common and what you can do to stop yourself falling into the same traps.
Books
In this episode I reviewed They Ask You Answer by Marcus Sheridan (a must read for anyone working in marketing, but also a super useful resource for many small business owners)
You can go to the Marketing for Introverts Bookshop to see the full list of books recommended in this series
Resources
Need some marketing planning help this year?
For more books that I recommend go to the Marketing for Introverts bookshop (This page includes affiliate links)
And just for fun – what’s your marketing personality?
