Are you a small business owner wondering why your marketing efforts are falling flat?
You’ve done all of the right things (or so you think). You’ve made a social media page, you’ve started a blog, you’ve even bought a billboard or two. Why aren’t the customers flooding in and utilizing your services?
You might be making some serious marketing mistakes without even knowing it!
People who are new to the marketing world might think that it’s easy. They copy what they think other people are doing and get confused when they don’t have the same success.
Believe it or not, these other companies have made their mistakes already. Time and effort contributed to their success.
To help you out, we’ve listed a few common marketing mistakes that you should avoid when you’re trying to get your business off of the ground. Keep reading to learn more.
1. Not Being Consistent
With marketing, as with anything, consistency is key. If you want to attract new customers and keep your old ones, you need to make sure that your marketing strategy is consistent.
This doesn’t mean that you can’t make changes. It means that you shouldn’t go for long gaps without utilizing marketing efforts and you shouldn’t change your marketing so significantly that it confuses your customers unless you’re doing a brand overhaul.
You want your customers to know who you are. That identity should permeate your brand and all of your marketing materials. Changing it up too much, or letting your marketing fall by the wayside, will cause you to slip out of your customers’ minds.
2. Not Knowing Your Target Audience
Speaking of customers, who are you marketing toward? Too many businesses aim for an “anyone and everyone” approach. Why not try to attract everyone to your products and services?
While this makes sense in theory, in practice it can make your marketing confusing and downright ineffective. You need to focus on specific groups with each marketing effort.
For example, if you’re looking to attract millennials and gen Z, you want to focus a lot of effort on influencer marketing and other social media marketing tactics. That’s where these groups look for their information and spend their time.
If you don’t have a target in mind, your marketing techniques will look muddled and confusing, driving customers away from your brand.
3. Ignoring Conventional Marketing
While digital marketing is king in 2021, that doesn’t mean that you should toss away conventional marketing. This is especially true if you have a brick-and-mortar business that’s trying to appeal to local crowds.
You need a strong digital marketing campaign, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t also need a great business card or strong community outreach efforts. These things work on a small scale, and you might not see obvious results, but you’ll reach people who may not have noticed you online.
4. Not Diversifying
Speaking of conventional marketing, you want to make sure that you’re diversifying your marketing efforts. One of the biggest marketing strategy mistakes that anyone can make is to put all of their eggs in one basket, so to speak.
This presents several problems.
First, you’re limiting your audience (and not in a good way). Although you want to target specific groups, you also want to make sure that you have as many ways as possible to target those groups.
That means that you should have a strong, SEO-optimized website, a good social media presence, and a few alternative marketing ideas depending on your target.
Adding in an email marketing campaign or an SMS marketing campaign is a great way to bring in business from repeat customers. Social media marketing, on the other hand, is great for drawing new people in.
Not everything is going to work for you, so you don’t need to use every marketing trick in the book. You should try to have several forms of marketing going at once, though, and you can adjust later if need be.
5. Not Researching Ahead of Time
One of the worst conventional or digital marketing mistakes to avoid is forgoing the research phase ad jumping headfirst into your marketing campaign.
We get it. You’re enthusiastic and you’ve read a few articles. Why not get your campaign off of the ground as soon as possible?
You need to remember that behind every good marketing campaign lies a team of people who spent time constructing it based on market research. They’ve determined who their customers are, what they want, what appeals to them, and where they spend their time.
For a new business owner, this might seem like wasted time. If you’re trying to grow your business, why not get started now?
Marketing is expensive and time-consuming. If you don’t do your research before you get started, you’ll spin your wheels and make no progress.
6. Not Tracking Results
As important as research is, tracking results is more important. This is where you determine your marketing mistakes and successes so you know how to move forward with your campaign.
There are several metrics that you can track to determine how you’re doing. You can check on conversion rates, revenue, and the audiences that are paying the most attention to your brand.
If something isn’t going to plan, it’s easy to re-route when you know what the cause is. For example, if you can tell that no one is coming to your site from the influencer that’s marketing for you, you know that you may want to try a different influencer.
Marketing is a trial and error process.
Avoid These Marketing Mistakes
These marketing mistakes are avoidable if you plan and take the right steps.
You want to make sure that you’re diversifying your efforts, targeting the right people, and keeping tabs on your results as the campaign moves along. If you do these things and stay consistent, you’re sure to gain more happy customers.
Start developing your new marketing campaign today!
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