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7 Marketing Blunders To Avoid For Business Success
When you’re a small business with limited resources and funds, marketing to your customers can have you running in circles. Mistakes can turn the best plans into lost time and money.
Many marketing mistakes are too easy to make. Below are seven common marketing pitfalls to avoid. You can learn from these without having to experience them yourself. You can make wiser marketing decisions, setting yourself up for success.
1. Your Business An Invisible Business
One of the most important things you need is visibility. Years ago, you’d list your business in your local phone book, and boom, you were done. Today, audience building starts on the most-used platforms and search engines.
Places like Yelp or Google My Business make it easy for your customers to find you when they need you. It’s usually free to develop your profile.
List yourself on several platforms to be more easily found on the web. Update phone numbers and addresses as they change. It’s the easiest but most forgotten part of marketing yourself.
2. Your Site Is Outdated
Customers judge you by your website–you should look professional and be user-friendly. They don’t trust a business whose website looks old or is old. See below for how Google will penalize you for this, too. Your potential customer may already be checking your competitors if your images take too many seconds to load.
Make your website mobile-friendly and responsive. Your site should quickly rearrange images to fit whatever screen size your customer is using.
Google Mobile-Friendly Test can tell you how well your website works by Google’s standards. Google is one of the most used search engines, so it pays to play by their rules. You’ll lose rankings if your site doesn’t tick their boxes. The more mobile-friendly and responsive it is, the higher you’ll appear in a search engine and the more views you’ll get.
Consider hiring a professional to bring yours up to par if it needs it. Matching customer expectations on the first click will be money well spent and time well saved.
3. You Have A Poor Online Presence
How can social media help a business grow?
Social media platforms have transformed communication and connections, helping businesses build valuable relationships. Consider the fact that your target audience uses some form of social media almost guaranteed, so your social should be up to date. So should your email list, content, and online reviews.
Plus, you build a rapport with your audience by interacting directly with them. That turns into trust, and people would rather buy from someone they trust.
To effectively tap into the internet’s full potential, continue to keep up your online presence by doing some of the following:
- Respond to followers
- Share others’ posts
- Reveal interesting tidbits of information
- Comment on or ‘Like’ what others are saying
- Create engaging posts with questions, polls, images, and contests.
Then, rinse and repeat. In other words, do these things over and over again daily or several times a day.
4. Your Plan Is Unclear Or Immeasurable
You wouldn’t take a trip without a destination in mind. Similarly, your marketing must also begin with an end goal.
Goals should be SMART:
Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Relevant
Timely
For example, “I want to increase my website traffic by 15% in four months.”
Once you’ve written down your goal or goals:
- Determine what customers you appeal to (target market research)
- Consider how much money you can spend (budget)
- Examine what makes you different from competitors (value proposition)
- Figure out what channels you’ll use to reach your target audience (segmentation) and how you’ll measure the success of your efforts (metrics)
Visible and clear goals allow teams of people to help meet expectations without you controlling the steering wheel 24/7. Plus, it’s easier to see your progress and where you might need to correct your course.
5. Your Target Audience Analysis Is Inadequate
The foundation for marketing success is connecting with the right consumers in the right place at the right time. Otherwise, you’ll spend time and money on strategies that don’t have the most significant impact.
A comprehensive analysis can better help you grab your potential customer’s attention. You’ll learn their demographics (age, gender, income, etc.), behaviors, likes, and dislikes. Once you have a comprehensive understanding, you can create personas and customize your marketing messages to appeal directly to your target market.
6. You Aren’t Quantifying Results
Marketing involves experimentation to discover what clicks in your market with your customers. You need to know which efforts are the biggest needle movers and which aren’t. The last thing you want to do is funnel resources into something that isn’t producing results.
You should have a way to track your progress. Then use those analytics to your benefit. A few results you should consider quantifying include customer acquisition costs, lifetime value, and conversion rates. Study your data and apply what you learn to optimize potential growth opportunities.
7. You Are Ignoring The Influence Of Content Marketing
Content marketing is a vital part of a modern-day marketing strategy. DemandMetric says content costs 62% less than traditional outbound marketing strategies but garners three times the leads.
Customers can value informative and engaging content that isn’t a sales pitch, like blogs, vlogs, media updates, and social media posts. Focus on building a relationship first, and you’ll gain recognition and trust with your audience. You’ll emerge as a knowledgeable leader in your field.
Using multiple channels is critical for success. You’ll eventually want to narrow down to the few that give you the best results. Add paid advertising and search engine optimization for an impactful, well-rounded strategy.
Experiment + Experience
Marketing is experimentation. What works for one business won’t necessarily work for another. Ever-evolving customer needs and tech capabilities continue to change what works best. It’s a combination of making educated guesses, trialing or testing what’s worked for others, and revising your plan of attack using the scientific method.
Remember those seven time-tested blunders you can avoid to get you closer to success faster. Just keep analyzing and striving to improve.
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