Manizesto

It’s nice to talk about all the great things one has accomplished during the year and it’s easy to highlight the blunders of others, but I think it’s much more useful and tangible to look at your own marketing mistakes.

Here are the biggest mistakes I made in marketing this year:

* I neglected my best customers. Not completely, of course, but your best customers should truly receive the most pampering, the best support, the best offers and a truly outstanding experience. I didn’t give them that.

* I settled for sub-par technology. There are some amazing marketing tools out there that can make innovation very intuitive and simple to do. They allow you to market to your existing and potential customers in incredible ways. But this year, I plugged along with the same adequate but not robust technology.

* I didn’t emphasize Life Time Value (LTV) enough. I spent a lot of time focusing on acquisition costs and measuring the performance of each marketing channel based on how many dollars it took to get that initial purchase. But how much did that customer bring in after 3 months? One year? Five years? Understanding LTV and how to increase it will help you know how to spend your money more wisely and see where your best customers are coming from (billboards, radio, banner ads, email etc).

* I didn’t have enough fun. You can’t avoid the tactical work of marketing: setting up campaigns, running tests, analyzing results, compiling data and so forth, which is, you know, exhilarating and everything, but does leave me wanting. I had too many days where I went to meetings, executing campaigns and tracked them instead of finding ways to make the work more engaging and fun for me (and for my customers).

I’ll save the endless list of small embarrassments and mistakes for another post (teaser: I emailed a vendor saying “Hell Amy” rather than “Hello Amy”. Luckily she laughed it off).

Before you go jumping into making resolutions for next year, take some time and look at the biggest mistakes you made. Your goals should probably address those first.

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