Top 3 Ways to Waste Marketing Dollars

inc.com
/>Top 3 Ways to Waste Marketing Dollars
It's easy to burn through a budget with these big-ticket items. There's a better way to spend your
cash.
Flickr/professor evil
There are a dozen ways to spending a marketing budget unwisely, but the following three line
items are probably the worst offenders. Steer clear of all three or, better yet, make a tweak to
transform them from money-wasters into moneymakers, .
1. Vendor-Focused Trade Shows
There are only two reasons to attend a trade show: 1) to generate sales leads or 2) to close
existing opportunities. Both goals are impossible to achieve if neither customers nor potential
customers attend the trade show.
For example, I know a guy who spent $100,000 for a booth at a trade show and got only 132
"sales leads." And all but 22 of those "leads" were people from other vendors who were looking for
a new job.
In order to convince companies to pay for booth space, trade show companies tend to provide
misleading attendee statistics and sometimes threaten to make your non-attendance into a PR
disaster.
Smarter strat egy: Insist that every trade show investment be matched by a reasonable
financial return, in the form of sales leads that eventually generate revenue. If you're not
confident the trade show will more than pay for itself, don't attend.
2. Brand Awareness Campaigns
Your brand is important. However, unless you're selling a mass-market consumer product and
willing to spend many millions on advertising, it is your products and services that will create your
brand not your marketing activity.
I once watched a company spend $1 billion in brand marketing over a five-year period, while
continuing to make products that fewer people wanted to buy. Their marketing collateral was
gorgeous, but they went out of business.
The truth is that brochures, websites, videos, and advertisements aimed at raising "brand
awareness" are usually a waste of money. There's just too much "brand spam" floating around for
anyone to take notice.

Smarter strat egy: Set goals for and measure every marketing activity by whether (and
how well) it creates sales leads or shortens the sales cycle. In other words, treat marketing
activity as tactical, rather than strategic.
3. Bogus Market Research
Market research can give you an accurate snapshot of what your customers are thinking and
feeling, providing that research is quantitative, statistically valid, and independent of a hidden
agenda.
Unfortunately, most market research is qualitative, statistically invalid, and/or skewed to a
foregone conclusion. "Focus groups," for instance, tell you nothing except what a small group of
people think.
Similarly, most polls only test people who have already shown enough interest to agree to take
the poll. Furthermore, "independent" research firms, when hired by vendors, usually know ahead of
time what findings are desired and adjust the research to fit.
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Geof frey James writes the Sales Source column on Inc.com, the world's most-visited
sales-oriented blog. His newly published book is Business to Business Selling: Power
Words and Strategies From the World's Top Sales Experts. @Sales_Source