Left Brain Focus for Right Brain Creative Businesses

Top 12 Reasons Your Marketing Failed

fail test1. Sending a mailing to the wrong people.  A free set of steak knifes won’t get a response from vegetarians.

2. Offering something nobody wants:  free dog poop!  Or, a bra dryer!

3. Making it hard to respond.  Nobody can find the telephone number, see the buttons, or take the time to answer 23 questions.

4. Using the wrong medium.  You’re using Twitter to reach senior citizens.

5. Writing boring copy:  “We’ve been in business 25 years.  We guarantee our work.  Please buy from us.”

6. Trying to use every medium (direct mail, email, speaking, magazine ads, directory listings, articles, and banner ads) and spreading your message and resources too thinly.

7. No emotional selling point (not what your product does, but how it makes people feel).

8. Talking about yourself (see #5), instead of about your customers.

9. It’s indistinguishable from your competitors.

10. Great copy, but a poor headline, so nobody looks at the headline or reads the ad.

11. Being too vague; promising great results without specifying what they’ll be.

12. Failing to show how you solve a problem the customer cares about (maybe a way to quickly clean up all that dog poop?).

Tomorrow, 12 ways to turn your failed marketing into a winner.

Photo adapted from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/92239147@N00/462868700/ elginwx

Related posts:

  1. 12 Ways to Turn Your Failed Marketing into a Gold Star Winner
  2. Ten Reasons Your Brochure Gets No Sales
  3. Why Some Free Offers Fail, and What You Can Do About It
  4. Do You Make These Common Marketing Mistakes?
  5. Avoid These Five Email Marketing Mistakes

2 comments

1 Greg Digneo { 06.17.09 at 10:30 am }

I think that a guarantee can work, if it is backed up. An empty guarantee does nothing but make people skeptical. A “money – back” guarantee can eliminate a barrier to purchase.

2 Jodi { 06.17.09 at 1:02 pm }

A guarantee can absolutely work. More on that tomorrow!

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