Your worst marketing ideas

Everyone looks for the “good” marketing ideas. Those sometimes are so subjective with respect to the type of company/product/customer, that anything other than the most generic things, while interesting, may not be very applicable.

So, then, what are some of the things you’ve tried to market your product that turned out to be a complete waste of time and money (or worse)?

Would be interesting to see if people here have tried things that are considered “good practices” in marketing, but in reality never brought any benefit.

Everything related to print ads. :smile:

We are also often contacted to do newsletter advertising by e.g. publishing houses. They often have fairly small lists (a few thousand subscribers) and want to charge serious money so this wouldn’t make sense for us. If you know your typical conversion rates and the list size + open/click rate it’s easy to calculate if a campaign make sense.