I decided to post the short take-aways from the piece I wrote yesterday on Intuit’s botching of a one-day sale promotion of their QuickBooks product. I'm not doing this to trash Intuit. I still love their software and they will soon enough get this marketing boo-boo behind them. Rather, like Intuit, I too learned these lessons the hard way and thought they were worth a stand-alone entry on those merits alone. Good luck! -john
Make the Most of Your Marketing Campaigns – 5 Quick Tips
Lesson #1: Failing to anticipate a competitive response could make your seemingly great promotions not appear so great to your customers when they go live.
Lesson #2: Make sure you test, and then test again before putting a new promotion or marketing initiative in front of your customers. Don't let your customers find mistakes you should have found yourself!
Lesson #3: Make sure you've got adequate resources lined up to handle the response if your promotion is successful – or if something goes wrong. At minimum, you need to think through the contingencies.
Lesson #4: Make sure you've got all hands on deck and prepared BEFORE you go out with a highly visible marketing campaign or promotion. But do not promote beyond your organization's capacity to respond.
Lesson #5: When you or your team mess something up, the best way forward is a post-mortem from which you learn, not blame. That's hard but critical.
Bottom line: When planning you next marketing campaign or promotion, learn from the mistakes even an old hand like Intuit made this week and you will go far toward ensuring its success. Sometimes it's the basics that matter most.
Full disclosure: Like I said above, I still love QuickBooks software and strongly encourage startups and entrepreneurs to use it. But if you choose to buy Intuit products (QuckBooks, Quicken, or TurboTax) by clicking on the links to the right I do earn a small commission on the sale for which I am most grateful. I suggest, however, that you use this Amazon link instead to buy QuickBooks as it will save you $100 at time of this post.