Common Mistakes to Avoid When Selecting Marketing Strategies for Your Business

The dark arts of marketing are an utterly indispensable component of creating a successful business. Still, for far too many, it remains an elusive activity shrouded in misinformation and old tactics. Ok, so that introduction might be ever so slightly hyperbolic, but the truth is that many businesses find it tricky to understand what they ought to be doing in order to drum up more business and develop a higher level of recognition of their brand.

In this post, we aim to demystify the hype surrounding marketing and will give you several of the most common mistakes made when attempting to perform the task so that you can avoid them yourself when starting your own campaigns.

Believing That Online Advertising Is The Only Way To Attract New Customers

It wasn’t all that long ago when offline marketing channels were far in excess more popular and valuable than their online variants. While those days are long behind us, and online marketing has taken on a world of its own, the fact remains that an overreliance on the online world over offline techniques could result in lost sales.

Specific sectors and business types will find far more success by opting to utilize efficient direct mail printing tactics that create a much more personal style of marketing that can be lost when choosing something like a random Facebook ad.

If your operations are mainly localized and you want to appeal to those in a particular locale, physical media could serve you much better and help you to build brand recognition to those who actually count for you much faster than taking the shotgun approach and spending a fortune with the likes of Google and Facebook.

This isn’t to say you have to totally eschew the digital options, but we are saying that to ignore the various channels at your disposal is a mistake that could cost you dearly. 

Ignoring Your Target Audience’s Needs

Marketing 101 says that to gain the biggest bang for your buck, you should target those who are interested or have shown an interest in your products. This might sound obvious, but there are plenty of examples of smaller, nascent enterprises incoming this point in the quest to appeal to as many people as humanly possible.

The problem with this way of doing things is that you will not just achieve a poor ROI and spend money that won’t result in any sales, but you could actually damage your brand by annoying those who are entirely uninterested in what you have to offer.

Instead, you will yield far greater results by analyzing your target audience and putting all of your marketing resources into enticing them into your fold. 

Failing To Set Clear Goals

Fail to set goals, and you might as well throw your money down the drain. And before you ask, making more money is not a clear goal! Your preferred outcomes from your ad spend will vary based on your industry, what you have to offer, and your marketing budget (and expertise), but some examples of some possible goals that will help you move the needle include:

• Increase brand awareness by 20% within the target audience in the next quarter, measured by social media reach and brand mentions.
• Achieve a 15% increase in website traffic from organic search within six months, focusing on keywords related to our core product offerings.
• In the next two months, generate 500 qualified leads through the new lead magnet campaign.
• Increase sales of product X by 15% in the next fiscal year.

These are all incredibly vague but should give you a good indication of what it means to set goals that you are able to aim for. Taking this step will provide you with tangible things to head towards and data that you can use.

For example, if you fail at a specific goal, you can look back and see what is worrying you so that you can correct it in your next campaign. Conversely, if you manage to meet or blast past expectations, you can see where it all went so well and replicate the process ad infinitum. 

Overlooking Budget Constraints

We all wish we had more money to spend on actions that will make more money, but the reality is usually that you will have budget constraints that only allow you to scale your campaigns to specific levels.

What you want to avoid is blasting through your budget and eating into other cash earmarked for different aspects of your business, such as expenses. Instead, set up as healthy a budget as you can muster and remain disciplined when carrying out your marketing tactics. 

Neglecting Data And Analytics

It is so easy to collect data in a range of formats these days that not doing so is really inexcusable. You have free tools such as Google Analytics, as well as more advanced models and solutions that you can use to collect customer data both on and offline. This data will form your decision-making processes and, if utilized correctly, should result in more customers in the long term.

Choosing Inconsistent Brand Messaging

Brand recognition is everything when it comes to marketing, and if you are all over the place in terms of your messaging, you will cause confusion that ultimately leads to potential customers going elsewhere. There is a reason why you could be given a selection of marketing materials from a specific company and, without knowing who they’re from, will instantly be able to say which company is behind them.

Inconsistent messaging extends not just to the actual message you want to portray but to the colors, fonts, and images you use to promote your business. The more coherent you can make it, the more likely it is that you will achieve some kind of brand saturation among the category channels you use and, therefore, appeal to a broader range of people willing to place their money into your bank account. 

Ignoring Customer Feedback

Feedback does not often come up when discussing marketing, and as such, it is something that plenty of business owners tend to ignore. However, you can find an incredible amount of information by parsing the comments and feedback left by those who have seen your business via your marketing means and reshuffle things if needed.

While the mistakes in this post are by no means the only mistakes that many companies make in the pursuit of marketing nirvana, they are perhaps the most common. When you understand what marketing is and what you’re doing wrong, you can create a campaign that smashes through even the most optimistic goals you’ve set for yourself.