Putting too much effort into big budget marketing efforts Underestimate the amount of work involved in a marketing campaign To help you avoid problems, 15 members of the Forbes Business Council discuss below some of the main marketing mistakes they have observed among entrepreneurs, from opening a network that is too wide to waiting to create the perfect campaign. Read on to discover how these common mistakes can end up costing your company time and other resources. Most business owners undervalue their solution. Because they don't clearly state their value, they end up negotiating the price.
Some people think they'll make more money by offering the best price, which can be a strategy when you sell high-volume products. However, B2B buyers rarely buy just for the price, but for the total value delivered. Make sure people know what you're doing for them. If, for example, you buy products for customers as part of your services, let them know.
The value of this effort is that you buy the right product at the right price and the customer doesn't have to worry about the transaction. Offering the wrong content means implementing a digital marketing strategy that your audience won't respond to. Whether it's a tweet with little engagement or a brochure that mostly ends up in the trash, paying attention to what's wrong will help you figure out what's right. Tropicana is a brand owned by PepsiCo and sells fruit juices around the world.
The brand decided to change their packaging and it didn't work well for them. The saddest thing is to promote the new packaging: the brand invested 35 million dollars in its advertising campaign. Because of this marketing error, Tropicana had to endure a loss of 30 million dollars. Sometimes it's better to stick with the old.
Tropicana learned its lesson and returned to its old container. The car manufacturer Fiat decided to use the most shameful marketing campaign of all time. The company decided to target the female population by sending them love letters. To make matters worse, they decided to keep this campaign anonymous and send 50,000 love letters to Spanish women all over the country.
Receiving love letters from someone without any identity made women do one thing, and that was to fear having a stalker. Let's see what one of the letters says: when the company sent the second love letter, they put up a signature, a brochure and an invitation to the nearest Fiat store. After this revelation, many women decided to sue Fiat for its “not so romantic” marketing campaign. There is another packaging strategy that didn't work out for the brand and that is included in Marketing Blunders.
Dove launched its range of body soaps that come in various shapes to look like different women's body types. The effort consisted of supporting their “Real Beauty” campaign by supporting different types of beauty. These are 3 common marketing mistakes that I see all the time, but creating a strategic marketing plan involves more than this. We take our clients who need a marketing plan through an 8-step process that not only reaches their best target market with the best message, but also establishes the measures and structure so that companies know without a doubt that their marketing is working or not.
And if something isn't, there's a process for modifying and resetting it.
