ISBN 978-1-952320-14-9 (Paperback)
99 Marketing Mistakes (And How to Avoid Them)
Copyright © 2020 by Kenyon Blunt
All rights reserved.
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Foreword – David Meerman Scott
Today, buyers are in charge! The idea of mystery in the sales process is over. We research someone online before agreeing to a first date—is he a creep? We fire up LinkedIn an hour before an initial business meeting—does she have anyone I know in her network? We watch an on-demand movie trailer before deciding which film to see that night at the theater. We check out restaurant reviews and browse menus before booking a reservation.
But there’s a huge disconnect between the way people research products and services they are interested in and the way that small business owners market their businesses.
I see marketing mistakes every single day. The biggest mistake is small business owners who only focus on their own interests. Many people steeped in the tradition of product promotion naturally feel drawn to prattle on and on about their products and services. Yuk! But I have news for you. Nobody cares about your products and services (except you). Yes, you read that right.
What people do care about are themselves and how you can solve their problems. People also like to be entertained and to share in something remarkable. In order to have people become interested in you and your ideas, you must resist the urge to hype your products and services.
There are many other marketing mistakes that small business owners make. Well, there are 99 of them! Kenyon Blunt shares them with you in these pages, as well as provides advice on how to do marketing right.
I like how this book is organized around mistakes instead of the usual “how-to” formulas. I found myself nodding my head at many of them.
I encourage you to study the table of contents and jump right away to the mistakes that speak to you and what you are doing in your business. You can then take more time to read all of the mistakes over the next weeks.
This isn’t an academic tome because Kenyon Blunt is one of us, an entrepreneur and business owner. He has started or run six small-to medium-sized businesses and has a passion for marketing and entrepreneurship. He has marketed businesses to success. That’s exactly why Kenyon is the perfect person to learn from.
Read this book and learn how to grow your business.
Here’s to your success and your personal fulfillment,
David Meerman Scott
Marketing strategist, entrepreneur, and Wall Street Journal Bestselling author of Fanocracy and The New Rules of Marketing & PR
www.DavidMeermanScott.com
@dmscott
What is a Monograph?
I have to admit, I had to look up the definition of a monograph. A monograph is a “detailed written study of a single, specialized subject.” This book is precisely that – a detailed study of all the marketing mistakes that I’ve made. I suspect you’ve made some of them too. Before I go into that, however, let me tell you what prompted me to do something like this.
In 2007, I was hired to be the CEO of a marketing agency by a Private Equity Group (PEG) and tasked to turnaround an ailing marketing company. It was losing $800k per year. We managed to grow the company to nearly $12M in revenue, with an annual profit of around $2M. It was a real struggle to grow the company.
We took steps to fix many of the company’s problems (which took some time), but the one thing we couldn’t fix was the agency model. Marketing agencies were becoming obsolete, even back then. So, my marketing agency, like so many others, was caught in the crosshairs of a changing market. And, despite the turnaround, the PEG demanded even better results. I was stuck.
Have you ever felt like you couldn’t go forward, and you were scared to death of going backward? I kept thinking there had to be a ‘silver bullet’ that would get us to the next level. I kept trying more silver bullets – not many of them worked.
The problem is there are all sorts of new technologies and skills needed in today’s marketplace. Here are just a few of the roles I had in my old company: customer experience manager, digital marketing specialist, director of marketing analytics, statistician, application developer, and marketing strategist. There’s no way a small agency can be good at all of these. In my experience, trying to do too many things results in mistakes and wasted money.
Not long after this experience, I began a quest for a better way for small businesses to do marketing. When I went into coaching after running two different marketing agencies, I tried to market my own company. After all, I was a marketer for my entire career. If there’s one thing I should be able to do, it should be marketing.
I made even more mistakes – lots of them. I also realized that many other entrepreneurs were making the same mistakes as me. I started keeping track of all my screw-ups because I certainly didn’t want to make them again. That’s the story behind this book, 99 Marketing Mistakes You Can Avoid. Use this book as a reference on what not to do. I’m biased, but my Lean Marketing Process is an excellent way to do this.
I hope you enjoy the monograph, commiserate with me, and learn from the experience.
Introduction
A good brainstorming exercise used by business coaches is to have teams envision how they can 10X their business. It stretches their thinking. So, just for fun, I did a Google search on “How to 10X your business,” and I was surprised at the number of posts. As you can imagine, almost all of them had a different prescription. I did notice, however, that marketing was at the core of all the strategies. Here are some strategic questions for growing your company:
Are you playing in the right sandbox?
Do you need to focus or diversify your offerings?
What kind of talent do you need?
Are you focusing on the right customer?
I contend that marketing can 10X your business. When done right, marketing generates a consistent flow of leads, and you know that something will work before you spend the money. It’s like investing in a blue-chip stock—you are pretty sure the investment will pay-off.
The problem is that most of us don’t do it very well. We make mistakes – and mistakes cost money. It seems apparent to me that we need to get better at marketing to grow our small businesses.
This book contains 99 marketing mistakes. Unfortunately, I’ve made many of them myself. You can read them in order or start with a chapter that resonates with you. The episodes are only a few pages long, so you can read each mistake and apply them to your business. I’ve categorized the mistakes into six parts:
Errors of omission
Spending