If you need more time on the ski slopes or find that playing Call of Duty 4 on the Xbox is more fun than running your business I have some advice for you.
There are a wide variety of ways to contribute to your company’s death of course so I am going to focus on some of the easiest ones that involve your internet strategies. This is easy stuff so follow this advice and you can watch reruns of CSI Miami all day long.
Speaking of CSI Miami here is a great Horatio Caine quote.
“Alright, be on the lookout for an Eastern European male with bad teeth who may have access to an ape.” THAT, is great writing folks, no doubt about it.
Here we go.
Rule #1 – Do not tie your internet objectives to your business goals.
See I told you this was easy! If you have plans to increase sales by 20% then PLEASE do not require your internet marketing team to tie their objectives to these goals. It’s much more fun to talk about the fact that the web team increased site traffic in the last 3 months by 40%. Wow! They rock. Did that increased traffic turn into sales. Hell no but does that matter? OF course not! You’ll be writing letters to Horatio’s fan club in no time.
Rule #2 – Use the same marketing message for ALL your customers.
Easy again. You may be doing this now. Don’t worry about the fact that people want targeted messages now and want you to speak in their language. If you sell products to a wide variety of people with varying lifestyles then just keep it simple and tell them all the same thing. Don’t segment your site or talk in language their friends use. Viola! Chef Emeril is on in ten minutes with an awesome crab risotto recipe. Go watch it while you look at your bankruptcy papers.
Rule #3 – Don’t ever, ever listen to your customers.
Yes again this is easy and oh so effective. You see, they are going to talk regardless of whether you listen or not so you might as well ignore them, right? And even though thousands of people every day are out there talking to each other about what they like and dislike about company experiences and products don’t EVER listen to any of this crap.
Rule #4 – Don’t communicate with your customers.
This one goes hand in hand with #3, don’t listen. Don’t reach out to them and ESPECIALLY NEVER EVER reach out to customers who love your products and are actively saying so all over the web! Letting these people know how much you appreciate their loyalty is a death wish for your company killing strategy. DON’T DO IT.
Also if you have unhappy customers that are telling the world about a bad experience they had with your service or product, make sure you ignore them too. To increase your kill strategy you might send these unhappy customers a 50 page survey that expires in three days if they don’t fill it out. Make them feel very unloved and it works every time. Since they are active web contributors you win… uh by loosing of course.
Rule #5 – Do not create a profile of who your customers are.
Why the heck would you want to know who your customers are? Heck, if you did that then you’d have to create messages that resonate with them, that makes them feel special and makes them think you care about them. Nope, better to not know. It’s easier right?
Rule #6 – Do not study user behavior on your site.
Whoa partner. Stay far away from this one if you want to sink your business. If you create a new campaign make sure you don’t study what happens when people get to your site. You don’t care remember? If you advertise in a magazine or online make sure you don’t measure the results. If you have a site where people purchase products, do NOT measure the number of visitors versus the conversions to purchasers or what happens to those that leave the purchase process without buying. I could go on forever on this one so if you want to amplify your kill strategy contact me for more details!
Rule #7 – Make arbitrary and random changes to your site in lots of places.
I had a client who called to say they needed help. Their conversion ratio (visitors versus purchasers in this case) was down a lot since they changed some things on the site! Perfect. This guy has got the program down. I asked what they changed on the site. The answer was they changed 10 things that effected the purchase process. Awesome. Now even if you wanted to generate more revenue (you don’t, remember) it will take a lot more work to figure out what potential buyers did not like about the new process. So I suggest if you want to kill your company, mess with the conversion process randomly. That way when revenue starts to slide (or your referrals to resellers slides) you can say you just don’t have time to figure out what is going on.
Also if your site is not a mess to navigate make it so. This takes a little more work but you want frustrated users who exit your site pissed off claiming they will never return.
Rule #8 – Never provide valuable, educational content on your site.
Yes, if you have content on your site that educates, entertains or helps the site visitor with purchase decisions get rid of it now! If you have content they can use for problem solving or helps them use your products more effectively remove it immediately. Remember in your business bankruptcy strategy you want them to have to go elsewhere for product education before making the purchase. With a little luck they may never come back!
Rule #9 – Don’t use social media marketing.
This one is very important to gain more leisure time. Do NOT create social media marketing strategies (tied to business goals). If you already have some presence on social media sites then make sure you blab about how great your products are and never give them engaging content they can talk about with their friends.
Don’t post frequently and don’t entertain, educate or ever give them the vehicles to talk to each other about your company and products.
I can’t tell you how many companies I talk to and the conversation goes like this…
Me: “Do you have a presence on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter?”
Company: “Yes but we really don’t know how to use these sites for business purposes. We have a presence there because other companies are there.”
Awesome. This is great because their competitors ARE going to figure out how to use these sites for business. For our intended strategy I think it is better to set up the social media sites and ignore your customers by not providing good content regularly. They will get pissed off even faster this way.
Rule #10 – Don’t optimize search engine traffic for your site.
Yes, you don’t want them to find you remember? So don’t analyze your key word strategies or look at key words that get you more traffic in a niche segment, or maximize your key words per page. Also you might use popular key words that are not relevant to your business so when people come to your site they will bounce like a basketball. Ha! Yes you’ve got it now.
You also might consider using extremely popular key words so you come up on page 17 of a Google search for example. Way to go. Crickets. Search engine referrals? Not gonna happen.
Make sure you use all the proper methods to keep the search engine spiders from finding the relevant information on your web site. It’s better this way. Who wants to sit in a boring office all day actually creating a profitable business strategy. BORRRRING!
Wrap Up
So these are just a few of the ways you can use internet marketing to kill your company. If you have a very well known brand it may take considerable work to overcome the power of your brand. But applying these methods will really help. Also remember that your competitors may be using internet strategies correctly which will of course accelerate the time to your jump zone.
Here is the worst Quizno’s ad ever and is included in many sites top ten worst ads list. It features a “creature that looks like a cross between a rat and a coughed up hairball” as the mascot. There was a popular internet Meme at the time that looked like this mascot but what were they thinking? There was a huge back lash from consumers and they pulled the ad very quickly. It’s really bad. Click on the Quizno’s Logo to check it out.
So take my advice and you too can be finding new outlets for your creative freedom, or you can watch more CSI Miami.
“I’m Horatio Caine, and this much I know. At CSI Miami we never close.”
Click on Horatio for more of those amazing one liners or feel free to head over to www.michaelnewmanconsulting for more info on services. I promise no more CSI references.
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