Albert Ein­stein once said that the only peo­ple who nev­er make mis­takes are the ones who nev­er try any­thing new. No such luck in mar­ket­ing. We’re always try­ing new things in an effort to be more vis­i­ble and per­sua­sive at the moments when con­sumers are look­ing for us. Some ideas work bril­liant­ly; oth­ers, not so much. While it’s great to learn from your own mis­takes, it can be even bet­ter to learn from the mis­takes of oth­ers.

We all know the sto­ries. Some of the biggest brands have made some of the biggest mar­ket­ing mis­takes – the ones that make the all-time lists. Like Coca-Cola launch­ing “New Coke” in the ’80s and M&M’s say­ing “no” to being the can­dy E.T. was lured by in the famous movie “E.T. the Extra Ter­res­tri­al”, allow­ing Reese’s Pieces to gain major mar­ket­share. But not all mar­ket­ing mis­takes made by busi­ness own­ers and C‑Level exec­u­tives are this obvi­ous. It’s for this rea­son they can have even more dra­mat­ic and dis­as­trous results. When a mis­take isn’t obvi­ous (or isn’t called out by fear­ful employ­ees) its costs and impact can plague a com­pa­ny for years. I’ve seen just about every mar­ket­ing mis­take that can be made. I’ve cer­tain­ly made my share of mis­takes (who has­n’t?), mak­ing me an expert in the field. What fol­lows are five not-so-obvi­ous mar­ket­ing mis­takes I’ve seen as a direct result of com­pa­ny own­ers and C‑suite direc­tives.

1. Focusing On One Term Or Idea

Ego dri­ves a lot of bad busi­ness deci­sions. It’s rarely as obvi­ous as in the area of key­words. This focus tends to be more exag­ger­at­ed in small and medi­um-sized busi­ness own­ers. It needs to be caught quick and stopped. What I’m talk­ing about here is focus­ing pri­mar­i­ly on “brag­ging rights” phras­es but it can also be a result of false-con­sen­sus bias (in oth­er words, the belief that we are the norm and oth­ers act like us). This ten­den­cy applies to both organ­ic and paid search. I’ve seen peo­ple wast­ing many thou­sands of dol­lars in paid search focus­ing on terms they believe are impor­tant and ignor­ing the lit­tle alerts telling them there are addi­tion­al phras­es to con­sid­er. With paid search a num­ber can be put to the loss, that might make it the least destruc­tive because in organ­ic it’s worse – it may result in forc­ing SEO’s to waste time chas­ing one or two terms you may nev­er get and ignor­ing the pletho­ra of oppor­tu­ni­ties that could be earn­ing rev­enue. There is one focus: cost per action. How much time or mon­ey must be put in for each con­ver­sion? That is the only impor­tant ques­tion and what­ev­er terms or organic/paid search strate­gies max­i­mize that are the ones that will give you your brag­ging rights.

2. Being A Perfectionist

There’s inher­ent­ly noth­ing wrong with per­fec­tion. In fact, to say there is would be the antithe­sis of the word. And yet … If what you are striv­ing for is per­fec­tion you’re on the right track. If what you insist on is that things be per­fect before they can be used, then fail­ure is assured. It’s easy to get locked into paral­y­sis with tweaks and adjust­ments to any strat­e­gy such that it drags out a process and costs in missed oppor­tu­ni­ty.

A fre­quent exam­ple can be found with a web­site redesign (this phe­nom­e­non takes place all over mar­ket­ing, but design is the eas­i­est exam­ple). Your awe­some new design is ready, but there are just a few last minute changes. Then a few more. Then the design­er goes on hol­i­day for a cou­ple weeks. Then “hey, we should change this from Cerulean blue to Steel blue.” Then… you get where I’m going. The inter­est­ing part is that in 99 per­cent of the cas­es I’ve seen the site at the first “last minute changes” was 10x bet­ter than the cur­rent site. The con­stant changes can (and often do) drag out the launch for months, all the while los­ing sales to a dat­ed and inef­fi­cient old­er site where the new site could eas­i­ly have launched with tweaks still under­way and changes could actu­al­ly be inspired by ana­lyt­ics and not just (here’s the word again) false-con­sen­sus bias. The web is fast. Most times things won’t be per­fect. But things can be bet­ter than what’s there now, or bet­ter than what you did last time.

You’ll gain more from doing it than not. Some peo­ple call this “fail­ing fast” (though I hate the term). You don’t need to fail to learn; you need try to not be per­fect because that rarely hap­pens. Even if you achieve “per­fec­tion” on the first go, it prob­a­bly cost you a lot in terms of missed oppor­tu­ni­ties to accom­plish.

3. Together We Fail!

Often tied to the point above about per­fec­tion, though not always, is the “togeth­er we fail” approach. In today’s more relaxed work envi­ron­ments it’s easy to get led to believe that every­one should have a voice and that every opin­ion is valu­able. So let me ask this: when you were a teenag­er sit­ting around with a few friends and only enough in your com­bined wal­lets for a sin­gle piz­za, how long did it take to argue about what kind to get? Now, add in about a dozen more egos, make the deci­sion impor­tant for the wel­fare of your busi­ness, and we’ve got a poten­tial cat­a­stro­phe on our hands. Every busi­ness own­er ear­ly on has like­ly done this and learned fast the pit­falls. But if you haven’t … do. Some­one needs to be made respon­si­ble for a final deci­sion and a time­line to make it. It’s great to hear ideas. Heck – staff, cus­tomers, and folks on the street can have some great ones. But when it comes time to mak­ing impor­tant brand­ing, tech­no­log­i­cal, and busi­ness deci­sions, it’s time for the democ­ra­cy to end and the benev­o­lent dic­ta­tor to step in and make the final calls based on their expe­ri­ence. The alter­na­tive is a scat­tered mess of a strat­e­gy that leads to a scat­tered mess of loss­es.

Some­one needs to be made respon­si­ble for a final deci­sion and a time­line to make it. It’s great to hear ideas. Heck – staff, cus­tomers, and folks on the street can have some great ones. But when it comes time to mak­ing impor­tant brand­ing, tech­no­log­i­cal, and busi­ness deci­sions, it’s time for the democ­ra­cy to end and the benev­o­lent dic­ta­tor to step in and make the final calls based on their expe­ri­ence. The alter­na­tive is a scat­tered mess of a strat­e­gy that leads to a scat­tered mess of loss­es.

4. Leading By Anecdotal Data

We’ve all done it. We look at some data and make con­clu­sion based on it even know­ing as we do that the data is lim­it­ed. For exam­ple, one time I was run­ning an AdWords cam­paign and noticed that two weeks in a row there were two days that the cost per action was far high­er than was accept­able. If I could just trim those days out then the over­all CPA for the cam­paign would be awe­some. So I set­up some auto­mat­ed rules to drop the dai­ly bud­get on those days to one-third of what they were and gave the remain­ing two-thirds to the best per­form­ing days.

Fun­ny … it didn’t real­ly change the CPA much. Why? Because I’d basi­cal­ly only seen a small sam­pling of “what Mon­days are like”. Once more data was col­lect­ed a prop­er bid-adjust­ed strat­e­gy was devel­oped but it was not what I thought with a whop­ping two data points for each day of the week.

This car­ries into vir­tu­al­ly every area of mar­ket­ing. You see the search vol­umes for terms and assume big­ger is bet­ter because there’s more traf­fic. That’s one data point … then there’s con­ver­sions. I’d rather have half the traf­fic with a 3x con­ver­sion rate myself. Of course there’s also the anec­do­tal evi­dence of an expe­ri­ence.

It goes a lit­tle some­thing like: Busi­ness Per­son: We need to change the col­or of the blue wid­gets to red. Me: Why is that? Busi­ness Per­son: I showed the wid­get to my gar­den­er and he hat­ed it but would love one in red. Me: Is your tar­get mar­ket gar­den­ers who work for you? Busi­ness Per­son: No, but he’s a very bright guy. Me: But not your tar­get mar­ket. Busi­ness Per­son: Right. *crick­ets chirp­ing* Mar­ket­ing is an ide­al field to col­lect data, find sam­ples to test our assump­tions for a fee, run A/B tests, and so on. I learned from my les­son (and hope­ful­ly you will, too): wait until you have enough data to make an edu­cat­ed deci­sion.

The more data points, the more reli­able the data is. You first need to fig­ure out how impor­tant it is to be right on any spe­cif­ic sce­nario and then deter­mine the reli­a­bil­i­ty of data you need to accom­plish that.

5. Keep Up With The Jones’

I very often see busi­ness own­ers eye­balling their com­peti­tors try­ing to fig­ure out what they’re doing and copy it. There are sev­er­al not-so-obvi­ous issues here. But if a pic­ture is worth a thou­sand words, then let’s start with a core prob­lem with the log­ic, as told by Scott Adams:

Now, this illus­trates one prob­lem. If you copy, for exam­ple, their link strat­e­gy, you’ll be bas­ing your entire strat­e­gy on the data regard­ing the links they have. I have no prob­lem with com­peti­tor research, but if that’s all you’re doing you will always be one step behind which means you’ll always be a posi­tion behind as you’ll only know what they did pre­vi­ous­ly, not what they’re doing now. Anoth­er major prob­lem with this log­ic is that it assumes your com­peti­tors know what they’re doing. Many don’t. It also assumes you have the same resources.

I had a client who was in a com­pe­ti­tion against a com­pa­ny that had just raised $20 mil­lion in VC fund­ing. There was lit­er­al­ly no way we could pos­si­bly keep up with them on a dol­lar-for-dol­lar bat­tle. For­tu­nate­ly, they weren’t smart about their spend­ing in the SEO realm, which made it man­age­able (because we weren’t fol­low­ing their lead).

Had we tried to do every­thing they did, the com­pa­ny I was doing work for would have been bank­rupt with­in a few months. Be aware of what your com­peti­tors are doing, how they’re grow­ing their links, what con­tent they’re push­ing out, and con­ven­tions they’re attend­ing, etc. but don’t try to copy what they do sim­ply because they’re beat­ing you right now in the rank­ings. Fig­ure out what makes sense with the resources you have, take from your com­pe­ti­tion what you can, and add some of your own ideas.