Tag: #fail
How to #Fail at B2B Marketing: The Only E-Book You Will Ever Read, Possibly
Math: 80% of businesses fail 100% of the time.
While it may seem easy, failing at business-to-business (B2B) marketing requires more than just math. It takes a delicate blend of poor judgment and a robust lack of strategy.
But don’t worry. While the internet is crawling with so-called experts spewing complicated strategies for organic, gluten-free lead generation and viral cat videos, we’re here to make it easy.
Our brave new e-book, How to #Fail at B2B Marketing, provides the insights you need for no-results marketing that will tank your sales efforts faster than you can say “where did the leads go?”
The best part? Everything Some things in this guide may have been inspired by true events and a few mishaps we’ve encountered along the way.
… Continue Reading >>#fail: How to Create a Pandemic Marketing Strategy as Tactless as a Maskless Shopper Coughing in the Checkout Line
A global pandemic, civil unrest, out-of-control wildfires, economic disaster, locusts, hurricanes and marathon Zoom meetings: it’s been an apocalyptic year no matter how you spin it.
But marketing rests for no crisis – as they used to say in the marketing department at Pepsi – so let’s wade into some strategies that boldly go where angels fear to tread.
There’s always a “silver lining” if you ignore a substantial percentage of what used to be called “reality” before there was Facebook and the Kardashians.
Here are some tips designed to ensure that your marketing campaign lives up to the standards set by the hot mess inside a dumpster fire wrapped in a train wreck known as 2020.
… Continue Reading >>#fail: How to Create Google Pay-Per-Click Campaigns that Pay Off … for Google
A whopping 90% of internet search traffic takes place through the magic of Google, a company so ambitious that it named itself for a mathematical concept that means a number so big we don’t have time to explain it to you.
But that’s no reason not to trust them to help you play the world’s most popular pay-per-click competition, The Game of Google Ads.
This wild bidding war is perfect for the marketer looking to spend as much time and money as possible for results that are as predictable as ripening avocados.
Will your ad strike the right note at the right time with the ripe prospects?
… Continue Reading >>#fail: 5 Ways to Fail Hard at Product Management
A dream is a really fragile thing and market research is a death sentence when it comes to really stupid dreams…
Product managers – sometimes referred to as product marketers – are responsible for incorporating the voice of the customer into the development process to produce something – sometimes referred to as a product – that somebody will want to buy, possibly.
What is the big deal exactly? 15-year-olds can do it. We live in a world where it is possible to whip up six-figure profits selling slime out of your parents’ kitchen.
So when you hear the so-called “experts” droning on about things like “product roadmaps” and “market research,” just remember that a dream is a fragile thing and market research is a death sentence when it comes to really stupid dreams like becoming a millionaire by selling rocks or blankets with arms.
… Continue Reading >>#fail: How to Lose Friends & Influence Nobody with B2B Social Media
“Everyone” knows that social media is the key to #success. “Studies” have shown that harnessing the power of so-called social “influencers” can yield ROI that is like, literally, millions of times higher than other methods of outbound marketing.
We’re not sure what other forms of marketing these studies measure but the point is, when you consider the fact that the top nine or 10 influencers count 500 million people as followers, the open rate on your latest email campaign is not even worth talking about. So how do you get there?
Experts say it helps if you’re already famous:
“It helps to already be famous or to become famous to become a social media influencer…”
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… Continue Reading >>#fail: How to Repel Prospects with B2B Email Campaigns that Go Nowhere
To: Email List [email protected]
From: Our New Marketing Intern
Subject: Re: Hi! Are you looking to COMPLETELY CRUSH your email marketing strategy?!! Read me! 😊
Dude:
Ever wondered why some email campaigns get results and others go so completely ignored that you find yourself googling the outage map? How is it possible for an email campaign to fail to connect to so many people?
It’s more than possible. With the right techniques, you can craft B2B email pitches so repellent they won’t even be opened by mistake. Here’s how:
- Start with subject lines that are wordy,
#fail: How to Completely Screw Up Your B2B SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most thoroughly understood subjects in digital marketing – just ask 20 different SEO experts for help and you’ll get 20 different plans.
Hire them all and presto! You’ve got… a lot of plans.
If that seems confusing, you could try to learn it on your own. Keeping up with Google is fun – there are only 500-600 ranking algorithm updates per year.
We’ve Seen It All
With a landscape that changes every couple of clicks, SEO know-how requires a lot of keeping up. But SEO know-how-not-to is its own kind of expertise as well.
We’ve optimized websites since the days of Lycos and AltaVista.
… Continue Reading >>#fail: How to Suck at B2B Marketing Strategy
They say 80% of businesses fail, so it’s actually pretty easy to suck at B2B marketing strategy.
Still, a broken clock is right twice a day and you could get lucky, so here are some tips for covering all the bases in your next strategic marketing debacle.
Don’t Listen to Your Customers
The quickest way to fail is to ignore the people who might actually buy from you.
You know what’s best for your channel partners and customers, so why bother with getting their input? After all, it would be better if we didn’t have to deal with them at all, right? So why would we want to [gulp] actually talk to them?
… Continue Reading >>#fail: How to Write B2B Blogs that Suck
There are a lot of ways to fail at B2B blogging and sometimes we feel as if we have seen them all, but then from out of the blue – and yes, the internet is in fact, mostly blue; we looked it up – will come a daring and original new form of just plain terrible blogging.
But you don’t have to be super creative to fail at B2B blogging. There are plenty of ordinary ways to create B2B blog content that is limp, unreadable, ineffective or that actively repels or offends your prospects.
We’re going to walk you through some of the best ways to accomplish all of those things,
… Continue Reading >>