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Burning Money - The ROI Of "Worst Practices"
Part of the frustration for me as a copywriter and marketing strategist is when clients do nothing with the 
product I create for them.
They just sit on it as if merely owning it could somehow fulfill on my promise to “boost revenues and increases responses.”
And depending on the scale of the company, they could be sitting on anywhere from hundreds of thousands . . . to millions of dollars worth of new business that could be brought in as a result of the content and the marketing strategies I crafted for them — and they’re just twiddling their thumbs over it, hoping for a different result.
Now I have several theories based on why this happens, and without getting into a lot of psychobabble I’ll just say this as the bottom line is –they are an immature company. They have entrenched behaviors and mindsets that were in place long before I got there and it is those very same mindsets that keep them doing the same revenue-burning frivolousness that has prevented them from becoming more profitable.
Remember my rule about the difference between actions and talk (”When there is a difference between what they say and what they do — the actions are always the truth“)?
Said another way: what you want to watch are “Deeds Not Words.”
When this happens (and thankfully it’s a rare occurrence), it proves to be the case of no matter what they say, it’s the actions they take (and don’t take) that are most true thing.
Here’s a perfect example of this from an ex-client: for this company I had a complete email campaign laid out for them, along with ready-to-go keyword-rich webpages, case studies and press releases that would drive traffic through the doors like cattle herd through a narrow canyon — plus a complete strategy blueprint for it all and were clearly on target to making hundreds of thousands of dollars (they were a small company) in a matter of a few weeks.
All they had to do was execute.
Yet, months later they are still sitting on all that money that was theirs for the taking. Why? Because they executed none of it.
Truly if you were to look up ’scratch-yer-head, WTF? moments’ in a dictionary, their logo would be right next to the definition.
Furthermore, to say nothing of how this is just “Worst Practices“ (the opposite of the best practices I wrote about a few posts ago), I know it’s much worse than that. This is the ultimate in badly servicing their market.
How is that “badly servicing their market”? Because they are selfishly keeping their customers from enjoying a solution to their long-standing problems. While this company’s products could easily solve their market’s problems, they refuse to do so by their wasteful inactivity.
Darwin could never dream that his theory of natural selection would one day translate to the marketing field, but I know that the day is soon coming when someone else with a better product, that costs less and does more is on the horizon for companies like these.
And they, they will soon be snacking on the Worst Practices company’s lunch.
Stay tuned for an upcoming special report called “How To Burn Through Thousands Of Dollars And Drive Your Company Straight Into the Ground.” Think of it as a . . . positive approach to effective marketing.
By Walter |
Topics: Client Top Secret, Marketing Mishaps, Pet Peeves |