Business Costs: The true cost of bad marketing
How much does bad marketing cost a company each year? It is estimated that $400 billion for companies all over the United States each year. Now, for a small business or company in Denver, Colo., or other places around the globe, it does not even come close to millions of dollars, but if you add all the companies up and their marketing budgets, it makes sense!
Bad marketing is bad marketing. Typos, grammar mistakes, misinterpretations of messages and so much more can all cause a company to lose credibility and customers. Not only does it kill marketing strategies, but overall, company perception and branding efforts could possibly be right down the drain.
What is the cost of bad marketing?
What is bad marketing? “Bad marketing” is a number of different “bad strategies” set in place by a company or internal marketing team that does not understand their marketing is not efficient. How much does your company pay for marketing annually?
That is the cost of bad marketing for your company.
With no leads, sales, the wrong strategy in place, website traffic increase, SEO ranking or other ways to show success in the overall strategy, this is what bad marketing does. “Any is a marketing guru, expert or strategist.”
The first example of what bad marketing can be costing a company is their brand and reputation. An insensitive tweet, a political view or content that is being shared without a strategy is the definition of what is the cost of bad marketing.
As the CEO of Amazon states, “your brand is what other people say about you when you are not in the room.” A customer’s perception is critical in the digital world.
A customer makes a judgment call about a company and its brand within two seconds of viewing their website. What is a customer’s perception? Spelling mistakes, grammar errors, bad content marketing strategies and social media posts that just don’t seem relevant are all ways that a customer can negatively perceive a company’s overall brand and the company itself.
Where does all of this come from? To understand what is the cost of bad marketing, you have to find the originating point. A study conducted in 2015 from Moz and BuzzSumo analyzed over a million different pieces of content on the internet from blogs to services.
The metrics used to determine if the content was good, quality content that is needed to rank in Google reviewed backlinks and noticed 500,000 pieces of content had zero backlinks. What does this mean in our world? Well, to rank on Google, one of the top strategies is backlinks and getting websites to link back to yours.
If the content that is being published is not getting any referral traffic or backlinks, it could be an indication of hundreds of elements at play, but one of the most common is that the content is not quality enough for other websites to link back.
This study goes on further to explain that in-house marketing strategies can cost $120,000 annually for a company with little to no results. Yikes, no bueno.
What is the cost of bad marketing? $120,000 a year give or take for small to medium size companies. In the wake of a global pandemic, it is imperative that a company understands and evaluates their entire budget. What is bringing in results? What looks promising but is not getting the attention it deserves?
Now is the perfect time to figure out what is worth it and what does your company need to allocate other marketing dollars to? What about SEO? Ditch the print media.
It is important to understand that hiring outsourced work is just as important as finding the right internal team, but at the same time, would hiring all work through an outsourced agency be better? Is it more cost effective? It could if you do not have a single dedicated employee to marketing right now.
What is the cost of bad marketing? That is up to every company, but for most, it is reputation and precious dollars that could be allocated elsewhere. For a free SEO and digital marketing consultation, contact us today!