I've lost track of the number of stupid mistakes I've made with marketing. 

Whether it's running paid ads to the wrong page and wondering why no one was signing up. Or scheduling emails for the wrong day or sending them out with broken links.

The thing with most mistakes though is that you soon find out about them and you can fix them.

Some mistakes are rather more insidious though. They fool you into believe you've succeeded when in fact you've failed.

Something that gets me time and time again is overcomplicating things.

I've done all the “leading edge” stuff like websites that adapt to different visitors, email sequences that change depending on interests or the pace of the reader, webinars and videos that track how far you get in order to make different offers of next steps.

And it's not like any of these things failed per se.

All of them are decent enough ideas.

And I felt like I'd achieved something when I finally built and debugged all the clever technical whizzes and bangs.

The problem is that these complex tactics take an absolute ton of time and effort to implement and get working. And their impact is usually minor.

A couple of percentage points of improved conversions. A few more people watching videos.

If you're doing things at a large scale with 10s or 100s of thousands of contacts then those few percentage points of improvement are worth having.

But for a small client and contact base the investment in setting it up just never pays back. 

You're much better off doing something “unscalable” like sending a short personal video to your to best clients and contacts. Or upgrading the emails your new subscribers get. Or following up that extra one or two time with people who expressed interest but didn't buy.

It's easy to get tied up in the sugar rush of new tech or fancy new techniques. But you've got to ask yourself whether you're doing it because it's trendy and interesting – or whether it's genuinely going to make a big difference.

Usually the answer is no.