Marketing For Dummies, 4th Edition

Chapter 18

Ten Common Marketing Mistakes (And How to Avoid Them)

In This Chapter

Understanding that marketing to everyone and relying on discounts hurts profits

Recognizing the importance of treating all customers (even angry ones) with respect

Perhaps nothing’s worse than reinventing the wheel — especially if you invent a square one. This chapter presents ten all-too-common marketing mistakes so you know how to avoid them and keep your sales and marketing efforts on track.

Buying into Too-Good-to-Be-True Website Claims

Every day marketers are barraged with tempting offers for too-good-to-be-real web results. Hundreds of web marketing agencies or businesses claim to be able to boost web page traffic dramatically or to create instant popularity on social media sites. Buyer beware! Most of these claims are ludicrous. And often they verge toward the deceptive and unethical, if not being outright cases of fraud.

Nobody can script a few lines of code to make your website pop up to the top of search engine listings, ahead of sites with more visitors or more relevant content. Real web visibility has to be earned by building up a website’s content and commerce bit by bit via attractive ...