Manufacturers are getting excited about their new marketing budgets. Some marketers are so excited that they don’t know where to waste their dollars first. Let me help. Here are 7 ways that leading manufacturers are throwing away their marketing money. Are you in a hurry to bust your marketing budget? Skip to the end of the list – a bigger number means it is a bigger waster.
- Set up your Facebook account as an individual person instead of as a business page. Customers may be “Fans” of your business, but being a “Friend” of you as an individual may be uncomfortable.
- Write your website content so that your employees and executives like it. Make sure to ignore any customer requests or feedback. This is a great way to prevent anyone from contacting you to buy your product. Even better? Use internal jargon that confuses even your most interested buyers.
- Pay for Google Adwords ads without doing testing, optimizing, or tracking. Wasting money this way is similar to the Magic Money Machine (MMM) some ad agencies use when “developing your brand” – you throw money on one end and hope more money comes out on the other end.
- Get a Twitter account and tweet ads over and over until you ruin your reputation. BONUS POINTS: Pay an inexperienced “social media specialist” at your local ad agency to do it for you.
- Use the free hosting system of WordPress and then pay to redo all your work and optimization on a hosted account later in the year. If you are wasting your employees' time to do the update, congratulations – that still counts as wasted marketing dollars. You DO pay your employees, right?
- Buy your industrial directory listing. BONUS POINTS: Pay the amount the sales agent recommends. Some industrial directories reward payers by giving them clicks but no sales conversions. Find out about free industrial directory listings instead.
- Pay several $1000 a month to get listed by something like Yellow Pages so that you can be listed on the SECOND page of search results. Alternative for people who are out of money already? Get in the listings that actually show up in search results without having to pay anything. Yeah, I know, it sounds like crazy talk.
If you are doing at least 3 of these things, contact me this week to get your manufacturing website assessment that can save you money and increase your online effectiveness.
If you are doing #6 or #7, or even considering them, contact me today – you are burning money like congress!