As the economy slows, it’s tempting to cut the sales and marketing budget. A better idea is to reassess the strategy. But watch out for the 30 most common sales and marketing blunders.

Here are 30 mistakes entrepreneurs make when expanding fast growth companies, and the lessons they learnt. Some are classic mistakes made from time immemorial. Others apply directly to ’08. The lessons come from  interviews with entrepreneurs and my research with RMIT University over the past 20 years, which has studied the lessons from high growth companies’ experiences.

1. Entrepreneurs still confuse sales and marketing
2. No clear strategies coming into a downturn
3. Loving the customer to (your) death
4. Using pre-internet sales methods to sell
5. It costs too much to get to the customer
6. Trying too few ways to get to market
7. Outsourcing sales to the wrong bloke
8. Not valuing “selling” skills
9. Providing no compelling reason to buy
10. Overcomplicating the product or the service
11. Failure to make the most of email marketing
12. Not making the shift from old media to alternative media
13. Not running a paid search campaign
14. Building a website that is not optimised for search
15. Pushing products people don’t want
16. Trying to outspend gorilla competitors on advertising
17. Marketing in short bursts
18. Taking word of mouth for granted
19. Selling to the wrong department
20. Sales and marketing staff don’t understand the product
21. Taking the sale for granted
22. Ignoring new ways to advertise
23. Ignoring social media
24. No try before you buy
25. Believing there is no competition
26. Not fighting hard enough when a major client is walking
27. Being cut out of the complaints loop
28. Forgetting in the new world that old methods work
29. Lacking integrity
30. Letting customers speak to machines instead of people

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B.L. Ochman, BusinessWeek

For companies, resistance to social media is futile. Millions of people are creating content for the social Web. Your competitors are already there. Your customers have been there for a long time. If your business isn’t putting itself out there, it ought to be.

But before you take the plunge, bear in mind the many myths that surround social media.

1. Social media is cheap, if not free.
2. Anyone can do it.
3. You can make a big splash in a short time.
4. You can do it all in-house.
5. If you do something great, people will find it.
6. You can’t measure social media marketing results.

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I’m a big believer in the notion that search marketing and social-media marketing go hand in hand with one another. I’ve seen firsthand how they interact on search results pages and how insights from one channel can have an impact on the marketing efforts for both. What does seem odd to me is that some marketers and observers seem to view search and social media as oppositional either-or propositions.

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John Quelch, Harvard Business School

In a recession, consumers become value oriented, distributors are concerned about cash, and employees worry about their jobs. But a downturn is no time to stop spending on marketing. The key, says professor John Quelch, is to understand how the needs of your customers and partners change, and adapt your strategies to the new reality. Key concepts include:

1. Brands that increase advertising during a downturn can improve market share and return on investment.
2. Early-buy allowances, extended financing, and generous return policies motivate distributors to stock your full product line.
3. In tough times, price cuts attract more consumer support than promotions.
4. CEOs must spend more time with customers and employees.

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If they’re to do their job most effectively, designers should be brought into the innovation process at the very earliest stages. Too many companies still make the mistake of keeping business strategy and design activities separate. Typically, marketers conceptualize a new product based on company strategy; the project team gets input from various areas of the company and creates a business case; and senior executives make a final choice from among the possibilities they’re given. Only then does the idea go to the designers.

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All too often, people think that there’s one tactic that will help them win the marketing war. That line of thinking is not only unrealistic, but dangerous. When it comes to marketing, there’s rarely a panacea that will solve all your market share problems or a silver bullet that will slay the competition. However, a sound strategy will give you a fighting chance. Unfortunately, people often dismiss strategy because, unlike tactics, it can take time to have demonstrable returns.

So before you launch that next email, write that next blog post, or tweet that next tweet, think about your strategy first. What problems are you trying to solve? How can technology help you solve them? Is technology even the right answer?

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Google Analytics is a fantastic tool as it is - and it’s always improving, but there are a lot of people out there that have created tools to make it even better.

1. Google Analytics Report Enhancer
2. Google Analytics Business Notes
3. Goal Copy
4. Cleaner GA Profile Switching
5. Social Media Metrics
6. Enhanced Google Analytics
7. Google Docs Integration

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Here’s a simple technique you can use to join up PPC & email and get great results. We’ll take a B2C example to illustrate, but this will work equally well (if not better) in most B2B scenarios.

1. Target searchers early in the ‘research’ phase
2. Create something to help these people with their research
3. Turn the visitor into a subscriber
4. Turn the subscriber into a customer

The tactic has unlimited applications and can work far better in the B2B space, using how-to guides, whitepapers and reports in exchange for permission to speak to your web visitors through email.

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A good landing page is absolutely essential to get positive leads & conversions from your PPC Campaign.

It is very important for an advertiser to create a landing page that are both relevant & convincing enough for a user to take an action. Below I’m sharing some effective tips that you can use to create a better landing page:

1. Use Separate Landing Pages for Different types of Keywords
2. Don’t ask for too much Information
3. Your First Impression is often The Last Impression
4. Have Multiple Calls to Action:
5. Give Users Control
6. Use Graphics Wisely
7. Trust and Security still works
8. Keep things Simple and Tidy
9. Test Different Versions of Your Landing Page

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As a business-to-business marketing platform, Twitter has legs. About 56% of Twitter users say they use the online social communication site for business purposes, according to Rodney Rumford, a social media guru and one of the keynote speakers at the inaugural Gravity Summit on Social Media in Los Angeles Wednesday.

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