Top 3 Ways to Waste Marketing Dollars

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Top 3 Ways to Waste Marketing Dollars

It's easy to burn through a budget with these big-ticket items. There's a better way to spend your

cash.

Flickr/professor evil

There are a dozen ways to spending a marketing budget unwisely, but the following three line

items are probably the worst offenders.Steer clear of all three--or, better yet, make a tweak to

transform them from money-wasters into moneymakers, .

1. Vendor-Focused Trade Shows

There are only two reasons to attend a trade show: 1) to generate sales leads or 2) to close

existing opportunities.Both goals are impossible to achieve if neither customers nor potential

customers attend the trade show.

For example, I know a guy who spent $100,000 for a booth at a trade show and got only 132

"sales leads." And all but 22 of those "leads" were people from other vendors who were looking for

a new job.

In order to convince companies to pay for booth space, trade show companies tend to provide

misleading attendee statistics--and sometimes threaten to make your non-attendance into a PR

disaster.

Smarter strategy: Insist that every trade show investment be matched by a reasonable