The unwillingness or inability to share the problems they face and how (or if) they overcame them.

When companies do this well, they can take these lessons and start storytelling through their marketing. They make themselves more human. More approachable.

Not only can this have a positive impact on sales, it can help build a great sharing culture inside of the businesss.

Customer list for JV opportunities.

Companies sit there in their silos and miss out on all the cross-promotional revenue they could be making.

Their staff. If you're talking about your average SME, there's great power in unleashing your employees as a marketing force (and Im not just talking about your marketing personnel). Everyone has a social network, both personal and professional, everyone has friends, connections, opinions that they share that could all be harnessed as a force for marketing the employers products and services.

Businesses of all sizes generally fail to understand the importance of domain names.

This affects them in a few ways – portfolio management, SEM, brand protection, etc. But I'll just highlight the biggest and most widespread issue.

If a business's primary web address uses a mediocre or problematic domain name, then ALL their marketing efforts are rendered less efficient.

Why? Because the branded destination they're promoting is itself less "sticky", less credible, less compelling. It may suffer from ambiguities that cause traffic leakage and high bounce rates back to search engines.

The domain may be forgettable, which inhibits return visits and undercuts word-of-mouth growth. Those things should happen freely, magnifying growth; but they happen less. And managers rarely even know.

Businesses fail to appreciate these issues because they can't measure what they're losing UNTIL they upgrade the domain they're marketing. Then they see the difference.

In the mean time, they assume the domain they're marketing has no effect on results – simply because it's the 1 variable they don't change or test! But clearly Amazon.com and amazone-commercestorez.biz would see very different results even if they were marketed identically.

It's the difference between pushing a cart with wheels and pushing a crate without wheels. One glides forward, while the other scrapes along only at greater expense of force. Over the years, this extra friction adds appreciably to the cost of all marketing and customer acquisition efforts.