Learning by example. How not to market your product or service.
I’m going to kick off this week with a look at the world of bad marketing. A few weeks ago I posted an article called Marketing FAIL – 7 Newbie Landing Page Mistakes. Today’s post points the finger at some of the people who clearly didn’t heed those little pearls of marketing wisdom, courtesy of the Fail Blog, one of the funniest sites around.
An adage probably as old as marketing itself. With the viral nature of today’s web, doing something so totally wrong that it’s funny could be construed as a backhanded marketing strategy in itself.
Here is our list of 13 of the bestest marketing blunders.
Transparency is a great thing in marketing, but sometimes you can be a little too honest.
Poor message match in this example. Imagine the effect of spending money on a Google AdWords campaign to drive people to your landing page targeted to women, and then showing a photo of a man. In online marketing this would easily lead to a 5-Second Rule fail – and hence an exiting customer.
Free is a powerful sales and marketing tool, but you have to mean it to be successful, and follow through on your promises.
You wouldn’t try to sell steak to a vegetarian. Would you?
Trickery with fine print and bait and switch terms & conditions will result in your customers losing trust in your brand and abandoning you.
Check your work before it goes to the manufacturer, printer or live on the web.
When your promotional campaign ends, be sure to update your landing page with a message that makes it clear the special offer has expired. This is a good place to offer up a link to give the customer somewhere else to go instead of just leaving.
If you have a great product or service, don’t tease your customers when they’ve expressed interest. Hey, get 50% off our latest product! Please break window with hammer provided to access coupon.
If you don’t appear trustworthy – you’ll scare visitors away.
To maintain a professional operation, ensure adherence to your privacy policy at all times. If someone unsubscribes from your mailing list, don’t contact them. Thanks for visiting our site, we’re really sorry to see you go, and would like to offer you one more opportunity to be disappointed with our service…
Even if you have a Mr/Mrs/Dr/Miss on your sign up form, sometimes people will lie about their gender.
If you look up the word “irony” in the dictionary, it has a picture of this recipe book.
A classic underhand trick of online dating sites is to lie about your age or show a fake picture. This might get you lots of traffic, but when people see the real you, they’ll run for the hills. That photo is the landing page equivalent of a virus warning.
I can only imagine the tricks they are referring to:
A big thanks to the Fail Blog for their inspiration and great content.
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Wow, a free sandwich for buying 20 beers, that really IS sobering!
These are all great, I was going through the FAIL blog and nearly all of the photos can be related to online marketing in some way due to mixed-messaging. Take this for example:
http://failblog.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/fail-owned-website-fail.jpg?w=499&h=362
Don’t forget where your customers are coming from and where they are going to end up…
Lol
It’s even more awesome because the fail team underlined “website: to make it look like a link.
“visit our website using your phone” – gold
Ok I couldn’t resist. Looks like these guys could really use a landing page with a proper call-to-action (take note: 866-680-3059 opt. 4):
http://montgomery.pwapt.com/frm_idxmain.htm
not to mention their cool scrolling marquee (how’d they do that?) says to email them and doesn’t provide an address..
email FAIL
ROTFL. That was brilliant.
Love it! :)
Very good.
Wow the hamburger ad is the best… …with meat add 3 dollars… hahhaa
But maybe in this case it can be seen as humoristic?
Hi Oli,
Great post – always love the fail blog! Not sure if you've seen the pay-per-click specific blunders submitted by our followers @ http://www.yourppcsucks.com
Feel free to feature any of these poor attempts at advertising any time you want!