Marketing is a crucial aspect of your business strategy. If you want to boost sales, gain customers and grow brand awareness, a well thought out marketing strategy is a must and learn marketing mistakes to avoid doing it in your business. Unfortunately, even with extensive planning, It’s all too easy to get marketing wrong. So, here are 5 common marketing mistakes and how to avoid them.
1. Not Understanding Your Customers
In order to market successfully, you need to know exactly who your target customers are.
You need to know what they want, what they need and how you can appeal to their tastes and desires. The more you know about your customers, the more effective your marketing will be.
Targeting a specific market doesn’t mean that you are excluding people who do not fit your target demographic – it means that you can focus your marketing budget and your brand message on a specific market that is more likely to buy from you than other markets.
Consider narrowing your marketing message to target a specific group of people – this will be a much more efficient, affordable and effective way to reach potential customers and generate business. The more detailed your knowledge of your target market is, the more effective your marketing strategies will be. For more information about figuring out your target market, see our previous blog post on specific targeting.
2. Having no call to action
A ‘call to action’ is the action that you want your customers to take when they see or experience your marketing. Do you want them to call up and book a service? Subscribe to a newsletter? Purchase a product? Without a clearly defined call to action or obvious next step (eg. ‘Click here to book your free consultation’), your customers won’t know what to do with the information you have given them. If you would like to know more about calls to action, don’t hesitate to contact us.
See what we did there?!
3. Not staying true to your brand
Ensure that all of your marketing stays true to your company mission and your established company voice and personality. Your brand is who you are to your customers – if your marketing messages deviate from the existing voice and reputation you have established for your brand, you are at risk of disappointing, confusing and even angering your customers. There is plenty of room to be creative without breaking brand and driving customers away.
4. Failing to measure results
When it comes to marketing, you need to keep track of every move you make. You do this so that you can evaluate the performance of your marketing campaigns and ascertain which strategies are successful and which aren’t. If you don’t know what kind of action (or lack thereof) a marketing campaign inspires, you won’t know whether it is successful or not and your strategies will be based on guesswork rather than numbers, which is highly ineffective.
One great tool for tracking online marketing is Google Analytics, which allows you to analyse the ways people are interacting with your website and measure your advertising ROI (Return On Investment). Ways of tracking offline marketing campaigns include unique phone numbers and special discount codes.
5. Spending too much too soon
We know you want to blow the world away with your brand and your marketing tactics. But this will happen over time. Before you invest in massive scale ads and market to everyone and anyone, make sure you first take the time to test your target audience and work out which strategies work for them. It is much more effective to spend money on hyper-targeted marketing campaigns that will get results than blow your budget on massive billboards that may or may not reach your target customers.
Just because you are a small or a newly established business doesn’t mean that you can’t have a creative, inexpensive and successful marketing strategy. Avoid the common mistakes listed above and check out our cost effective marketing tips – you’ll be a marketing guru in no time!
Don’t hesitate to contact us for more information about successfully marketing your brand.