Marketing is becoming an increasingly important part of any business hoping to gain new customers and sell more products and services.
As the digital marketing landscape continues to overtake traditional marketing, more people are focusing on social media, inbound marketing and their email campaigns. However, as these can be seen as relatively “new” marketing areas, there are still quite a few mistakes that are being made on a regular basis.
In order to make sure your marketing campaigns will be more successful this year, we’ll look at the 5 biggest marketing mistakes that businesses tend to make. More importantly, we’ll look at how to avoid them and learn from those mistakes.
A lack of research
One of the most important parts of any marketing campaign actually comes before the campaign even begins. This is research, research, and more research. In fact, most of your decisions about what to do in your marketing campaigns should come from data you’ve collected.
Remember, if it is successful, it is measurable. If it isn’t measurable, then how can you decide if it’s worked at all?
One of the biggest mistakes with marketers and business owners is that they tend to go towards a goal based on intuition alone. This is a mistake, as they haven’t really determined the 5 W’s and H—who, what, where, when, why and how?
The specifics must be nailed down before marketing campaigns can begin so that you can decide who you’ll target, where, what methods you’ll use (how), at what time, what you’ll show and many other aspects.
A lack of marketing diversity
Your most popular source of traffic is Facebook or Google—great. But then they update their algorithm, or your account has some problem. What do you do then?
Or you use one specific marketing tool or method, such as email, content or advertising, but over time the efficacy decreases. What do you do then?
In order to protect yourself against the fluctuations in the market or updates from digital leaders, it’s important that you diversify your marketing strategy.
Focus on researching all possible areas that you can find success in. If your main traffic comes from Google, work on Facebook and Pinterest or LinkedIn. If you are focused only on advertising, stretch yourself out to social media or content marketing.
A lack of restraint
One of the many downsides of not having a good grip on the new digital marketing world is the idea that it is similar to traditional marketing.
In traditional marketing, your business will work to send the message out to the intended audience. The audience doesn’t have much opportunity to engage with you, and all of your messages are sales pitches in one form or another.
While that may have worked in another time, now it is all about inbound and social marketing. It is about engaging your customers in what interests them, responding promptly and appropriately, and working to educate them by providing them with free, informational content.
However, those still stuck in the old ways take their sales pitches along with them in every avenue. Every article they write, every tweet or Facebook post, every email and every single breath they take is a sales pitch.
There’s no wonder then that they have such low engagement and response from their attempts. The problem is that there is no restraint in their marketing, no understanding of their audience.
In order to avoid this, it is important that in your communications with your audience, you should do sales pitches less than half the time. Even better, you should follow the Pareto principle and have 80% of your message not be a sales pitch. This will help you in immense ways.
A lack of focus on keeping customers
It can be up to 25 times cheaper to keep a customer than to get a new one. This is not an interesting although trivial statistic. This has to do with what type of audience you are going to be targeting in your marketing messages.
A lot of what marketers are currently involved in is an attempt to get more and more leads for their business. They hope that a good percentage of those leads will be converted into customers. However, they forget that the customers they currently have also need to be marketed to.
These customers should not be abandoned after they make their first purchase. In fact, once that purchase occurs, you should focus at least half of your current marketing attempts on those current customers. You need to persuade them to make repeat purchases from you. Not only that, they should be moved up the customer ladder to where they are becoming not just buyers but brand evangelists, those customers that will actively promote your products without your having to ask them.
A lack of help
The last and biggest mistake that marketers and many small business owners who do marketing are guilty of is not getting help when they need help.
This is quite understandable—the goal of most businesses is to cut back on costs. It isn’t to spend more money on other people when you could probably, maybe do that work by yourself.
However, there are limitations to what you may be able to do. One may be a skill or knowledge limitation, to where you just aren’t adequately prepared to undertake this particular task.
Another would be a time limitation. Although you can do it, there just isn’t enough time for you to do this and do task X, Y, and Z in the given time frame. For that reason, it would be most useful to get help in one way or another.
With the new gig economy, this can be quite easy using services such as Fiverr and Upwork. The options really are unlimited, and the ones who help you may help boost your marketing strategy all the way to success.
The best ways for entrepreneurs and marketers to improve is to learn from their mistakes. Once you’ve noticed the parts of your marketing that went awry in the past, you’ll be able to fix those and find yourself on the road to success.
In order to make this a great year for your marketing, avoid these mistakes and help boost your business.
Uwe is the founder & CEO of online invoicing software InvoiceBerry. He is passionate about helping small businesses to simplify their everyday business processes.
