Running a terrible marketing campaign is pretty simple. Of course, running a great one doesn’t require much more effort. At the end of the day, you decide whether you’ll learn from the mistakes of others or make the same mistakes all over again.

There are tons of foolish mistakes you can make to assure your marketing fails. Nokia, McDonalds, Microsoft, Samsung, and even Susan G. Komen have made a wealth of horrific mistakes they needed to recover from, and if you want to experience the same flops as these major companies, these are the mistakes you’ll likely make:

1. Hire All The Wrong People

If you’re trying to run a successful marketing strategy, who should you hire? There are experts on marketing, social media, and outreach waiting to get involved with your job. You can even outsource this work to private firms for an excellent job that doesn’t require hiring permanent staff for that purpose. If you’re really interested in messing things up, you’ll just pass the marketing duties on to other employees and hope that one of them figures out what they’ll doing. You can even take on the burden yourself, and try to juggle marketing along with all of your responsibilities.

2. Have No Direction At All

What are you trying to accomplish through marketing? Do you have a new product or service? Is there an area where you really outshine your competitors? Instead of emphasizing the important parts of what you’re trying to sell, just share funny memes. Samsung used a popular meme character, colloquially known as The Overly Obsessed Girlfriend, to promote a product. What was that product? Nobody knows. The ad never really explained it. They just spent a bunch of money on a humor spot and expected people to understand there was some kind of product involved.

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3. Severely Mismanage Your Social Media

Social media is an amazing outreach tool, and is a mainstay of super effective marketing. It’s a way you can share images, videos, and testimonials of the things you’re promoting. It also opens up the content for questions, allowing you an opportunity to provide excellent customer service that will boost your reputation. Alternatively, you can post personal or irrelevant information through your social media, or mindlessly share things that you find interesting. It’s okay, maybe the right people will stumble upon your product without being prompted. Or maybe they’ll never know what exactly it is you do. Either way, right?

4. Copy Everyone Else

Wow, that marketing campaign worked out amazingly for your competitor. They really tried their best to set themselves apart, and used every opportunity they could to showcase their strengths. They shared the things that were unique to them, and that’s what drew in a much larger customer base. If you copy the exact same thing they did, shouldn’t that work for you? After all, you’re showcasing how unique you are by duplicating the way someone else was unique. That can happen, or you can make yourself seem completely indistinguishable from your already-more-successful competitor. Whichever!

5. Skip Branding Entirely

Statements about things that are important always seem worth sharing. If you run a private internet security firm, creating an infographic about what services like yours do for people is an excellent testimonial to how valuable your work is. Just make sure your leave your logo, statement, links, and information off of that infographic. You wouldn’t want anyone to accidentally stumble upon your business, would you?

Author: Clare Hawkins is a passionate writer who currently works at Local, where she shares her knowledge and expertise in both SMB marketing and web design. During her free time, she loves working in her garden or browsing through technology blogs.

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