4 Marketing Mistakes That Are Keeping Your Business Down

• Updated on: 2017-04-24
• Read original article here

The hardest part of running a business is getting your target customers to know that you exist. It does not matter how good your product or service is. As long as you are not visible to your potential customers, they might never get a chance to try your offering or tell other customers about it.

In their desperation to reach clients, a lot of businesses make the mistake of throwing all of their ideas against the wall and hoping something will stick. But marketing your business comes at a cost, be it money or time.

Each strategy that fails to reach your target audience is a waste of your resources. It is money you could have spent more effectively elsewhere. In this article, we will look at a few of the common marketing mistakes that can cost a business dearly.

Your buyer might not always be the person at whom you are targeting your product. For instance, if your company makes marketing tools for small businesses, your buyer might not be the business owner. Instead, the buyer might be the agency who takes care of their marketing.

While building a buyer persona, it is important to identify all attributes related to both the buyer (the agency in the example above) and the consumer. You must understand the demographics and profile of both individuals. Knowing how the two relate to each other is also vital to build a marketing strategy.

Marketing does not have to be a trial-and-error process. There are established guidelines that can guide you through all the different marketing channels. You do not have to commit the same mistakes others before you have committed.

For instance, if you are invested in Search Engine Optimization, it is an established fact that the anchor text for your backlink profiles need to be natural and diverse.”

Similarly, if you are launching a viral marketing campaign, your marketing content needs to engage people on an emotional level. People widely recognize these factors lead to successful marketing. You do not have to reinvent the wheel while devising a marketing strategy.

Few people purchase products on an impulse. And even though some do, it is important to realize that reaching out to these same customers for a repeat purchase is cheaper than targeting a new impulsive buyer.

Every marketing campaign, be it online of offline, needs a well-structured sales funnel. You guide your target customers through the funnel during their buying process. For online marketers, this most often refers to building a mailing list or an autoresponder to warm the leads before making a sale.

There are several ways to execute similar strategies offline. B2B businesses could, for example, initiate contact through cold calls and once the target customer is in the funnel, they may be reached with periodic follow-ups and meetings.

Consumer facing products could have contests and promotions that require customers to provide their mobile number in exchange for a giveaway and then market to these subscribers over SMS. Do remember to follow government regulations relating to these channels while reaching out to customers in your funnel.

Although there are established guidelines for every marketing strategy, your execution determines how successful you are. It is hence very important to monitor your business performance at each stage of your marketing campaigns.

With online campaigns, this is quite straightforward, thanks to tools like Google Analytics. If you are running an offline campaign such as billboards or flier ads, you may track their performance by testing unique phone numbers or CTAs (Call To Action) across different geographies and benchmarking the performance of your campaign across these different geographies.

Failing to measure performance can lead to wasteful expenditure which can be a ‘make or break’ point for your business.