Happy Halloween! With jack-o-lanterns, rubber masks and haunted houses, we thought this might be an opportune time to petrify you with some marketing tales of terror. No, these yarns don’t involve zombies, headless horsemen or radioactive sludge monsters from the Black Lagoon. Our heart-stopping, bone-chilling tragedies are populated by businesses that embark on ill-fated efforts to self-market their services with poorly designed plans and materials, or go cheap with the belief that all marketing services are equal, resulting in disappointments and money wasted.

However, each of these mistakes can be avoided with the right Internet marketing partner as your guide so that strategic marketing dollars are well spent and measured for results.

Mean what you say and say what you mean:
When a Miami t-shirt maker printed shirts in Spanish to market the Pope’s visit, the slogan, “I saw the Pope” was mistranslated into “I saw the potato.” Needless to say, he did not sell many t-shirts to the highly religious population who wanted to remember their visit by the Pope. Pepsi had a similar problem in China when its slogan, “Come alive with the Pepsi Generation” became “Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave,” when translated and printed. And then there was the client who tried to save some money by hiring an off-shore firm for writing customer service articles. The articles were intended for proper customer service phone etiquette; however, they were rife with phrases such as “So don’t ruin the whole process by being too cruel on the line. Be as friendly as you can, even though the customer is pissing you to death.”

The problems stem from a lack of understanding of both the language and the culture involved, and from someone trying to cut corners and do marketing on the cheap.

What the do-it-yourself articles don’t tell you…
There are a lot of articles and websites that espouse the thrill of creating your own marketing materials, but they often fail to paint the whole picture. While they can provide a general idea of the do’s and don’ts of creating a brochure, they’re not big on specifics; nor do they address the underlying effectiveness of creating a strategy that targets the market, creates the messages, marries those messages with visuals that drive it home, and finds the channels that work best to reach the target audience for the product or service. Simply said, if you want a professional job, you need to hire a professional to do it.

Don’t be afraid to leave it to the pros
You may be thinking about taking a do-it-yourself approach to your marketing because you’re wary of the cost of hiring a professional. But what means more to you: the money that you pay for a professional marketing company, or the amount of money that you net at the end of the day? Most savvy business owners would say the latter. When it’s all said and done, professional marketers help you reach more consumers with a message that is much clearer and more effective. That translates into increased revenue.

An amateur marketing strategy simply won’t cut it in today’s competitive world. Let corecubed find the best way for you to go to market, and on your budget to boot. Let us open the door for you to greater results and happier clients.