Modern marketing techniques seek to capitalize on online media such as blogs, videos, podcasts, and social media such as Facebook ads to generate awareness and pique interest in a company’s products or services. It aims to achieve these goals by attracting and retaining a targeted audience. The ultimate goal is profitable customer activity.
The Quest To Profit from Happy Customers
Some companies do marketing and other forms of social interfacing quite well. Thes use these methods as a principal driver for sales prospecting into new demographic sectors.
Ever since Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft Corporation, declared that “Content is King”, excellent messaging with top-notch content has produced billions in profits for many firms. If both the messaging and the product line is of excellent quality, things can end up going very well indeed!
Examples of marketing slogans that have been quite effective include McDonald’s “I’m loving it”, Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke”, and Nike’s “Find your greatness.” These campaigns utilized simple, easy-to-remember phrases that were uplifting and brilliantly delivered. All of these successes were a variation of Nike’s campaign theme: “Just do it.” All of these companies have been consistently profitable even though they are subjected to intense competition.
Some Notable Marketing Failures (aka Don’t Make These Mistakes)
Unfortunately, not all businesses reap their intended profits from marketing. Some actually fail badly, even when they attempt to plan out their marketing and communications. An evaluation of those that fail reveals some common threads and can be useful for those contemplating a marketing campaign.
Here are a few better-known examples:
- Apple. The iconic computer maker is known for great products, sharp marketing, and massive profits. But alas, even Apple has blundered on occasion with marketing. For some reason, they thought it would be a good idea to beam free U2 music to everyone’s devices, regardless of whether they liked U2 or not. The result: An invasive event that riled up customers whose musical tastes were somewhat different. Apple received a powerful backlash. Fortunately, they learned well from this mistake and haven’t done that again.
- Levi’s. The venerable maker of jeans committed a major blunder when they launched an advertising campaign to sell jeans using the phrase “Hotness comes in all shapes and sizes”. Apparently, they were attempting to target a full spectrum of body types: tall, short, thin, and full. Unfortunately, those responsible for adding images to the ads didn’t get the message: The advertisement featured an image of three super-thin, virtually identical-looking young ladies. Oops! That campaign fell flat on its face.
- DiGiorno. This popular pizza maker is perhaps best known for the advertising phrase: “It’s not delivery. It’s DiGiorno.” But not all of its marketing went as well. In 2014 they posted a tweet “#WhyIStayed You Had Pizza”. Unfortunately, they didn’t check out their chosen hashtag. They quickly found out that #WhyIStayed” was already being used in the context of domestic violence and why some of the abused stay in their situations. Their mistake went viral and they were quickly rebuffed with plenty of negative feedback. Thes effort was put to a halt and replaces by more sensible communication, and sales resumed.
Key Lesson for Increasing your Business’s Profitability
The key lesson to be learned is to make sure that you think through your marketing and social media strategy. Due diligence is key, not only on words and phrases but also on images that are used.
Lack of due diligence can easily booby-trap the desired result of increased profitability and badly affect your existing customer base. If you are not adept at marketing, especially in the cyber world, consider using the services of a quality online marketing agency so that your ads and other public interfacing do not backfire!
By looking at some of the bigger blunders made in recent advertising, you can learn a lot about what pitfalls to avoid. Doing that alone will put the odds in your favor.
