Your marketing efforts can greatly effect your business. It’s fairly obvious that not doing any marketing can hurt your small business but don’t fall into the trap of thinking that just any old marketing will do, some things can do more harm than good. Be aware of these 8 marketing mistakes:
1. Lack of Marketing Plan
Working without a strategy attached to goals is a huge step towards failure. Be clear on what you want to achieve and use the tactics that will best help you achieve those results. Keeping a clear target keeps everyone on the team on track!
2. Inconsistent Branding
Have a clearly defined style, logo, colors, and font. Use these throughout all your marketing efforts. Even better, create a style branding guide to give to anyone working on your marketing pieces. This will help ensure that your specific tone, look and feel are consistently adhered to.
3. Using Low-Quality Content
Using other people’s images from google searching, for your own is just bad karma and can get you into a heap of legal trouble. There are great sites like www.bigstockphoto.com that you can purchase images for relatively low cost and add your branding to them. In addition, just reusing everyone else’s written content, like blogs etc doesn’t make you a thought leader. Write your own content and contribute to the conversation. Share your experiences and knowledge. You have real value to impart on your industry.
4. Breaking Brand Promises
Do what you say! Walk the walk. Don’t just talk. Saying you don’t offer any products made in China is a selling point but if you start to sneak certain products in to increase your profit margin, your customers will be disappointed and not trust you. Which means they probably won’t come back to buy from you. Be honest, be transparent, and be consistent.
5. Underestimating Online Marketing
Many small businesses we work with say they just don’t have time for social media. Well, honestly you need to make time or hire a company like mine to help you. There are so many opportunities to market your service or product now online. Don’t sit back while your competition is capitalizing on this new frontier. You will be passed by.
6. Not Listening To Your Prospects & Customers
Poor reviews, complaints, and lack of sales are all ways that your customer can tell you critical information. Listen. Answer poor reviews to seek more information and try to turn that customer around. These could turn into some of your most loyal customers if you handle it honestly and sincerely. If products or services are not selling, it might be because the price is too high, the value is not communicated or they just don’t need that particular item to solve one of their problems. Be sure to measure your analytics to see where engagement is high and low. This will be your guide to what is working!
7. Poorly Designing & Not Updating Your Website
If your site is more than 3 years old, its time for an update. So many new web design and functionality aspects need to be considered today. Things like social media sharing, mobile responsiveness and more. We treat a website as an organic piece of marketing with constant updates. This keeps your site looking fresh, offering new content and ensuring all the latest updates are installed. And ensuring clean navigation is key to getting your customer to buy!
8. Being Too Unique
It is good to be a purple cow in a field of black and white cows. However, if you are too unique you can either overwhelm your customer or the customer doesn’t understand that they need your product or service. Be sure to offer items they know and love too, not just the super unique offerings. This way you can lead them down the path of knowledge (and buying) and understanding on their terms.
Many times you have to test, try and fail to find out what really works for your product or service and for your specific target market. See what works and do more of that!
