6 Common Marketing Mistakes To Avoid
Unless your business is fortunate enough to rely exclusively on worth-of-mouth to gain sales, the natural attrition of clients over time forces us to engage in marketing to replace lost customers with new ones.
Marketing is a tricky area because not only is digital marketing constantly evolving, every business is different so there’s no universal marketing roadmap applicable for every situation.
This can lead to marketing feeling like a haphazard exercise in trial and error where luck plays a larger role than knowledge or skill. However our experience as marketing professionals has shown us businesses making the same basic mistakes over & over again, often crippling their results.
This article will help you identify six fundamental mistakes to avoid in your next marketing campaign.
1. Over Complicating Your Message
Perhaps the most common marketing mistake made by small businesses in particular, is trying to cram too much information, too many offers, or too many products into a single promotion.
Erring on the side of giving prospective customers (or existing ones) more information than less worked far better in pre-Internet eras when consumers were starved of information & grateful for any provided.
Newsletters that offered “a little bit of everything” were popular with readers eager for information to digest, and popular with businesses because they excused them from making hard choices on which products to promote or audiences to target.
Those audiences are now overwhelmed by information, and are eager for ways to strip anything they perceive as non-relevant from their lives. They’ve been been conditioned by social media to be far more selective in the information they absorb, and their attention spans have never been shorter.
2. Failing To Deliver Value To Your Audience
The Internet has not only inundated consumers with information, but choices. Competition is fierce, so prospects assume they can access similar products for similar prices from a wide range of competitors.
The days of getting rich selling widgets for 5 cents less than the competition to the widest possible audience are largely over, since prospects will now make purchasing decisions based on factors beyond price alone.
In an era where an ever-larger percentage of sales are made online, trust may have surpassed attention as the most vital component to growing your business. With prospects choosing between vendors without meeting them in person or visiting physical stores, websites & marketing material take up the burden of generating trustworthiness in prospects.
Marketing psychology teaches us the most effective way to win the trust is by providing genuine assistance, and the easiest way to do that digitally is by offering prospects free information, tools, guides & downloads.
The more useful the better, so ideally they’re focused around alleviating the biggest pain point your product or service is designed to solve. For example, if you sold fly spray you might send prospects a link to a guide on creepy crawlies are the most dangerous, and ways to prevent them entering their homes.
This strategy not only engenders trust but demonstrates your knowledge in your field, presenting your products as capable solutions. Far more effective than simply bombarding your audience with offers when they may not even ben convinced they need your product at all, regardless of cost.
3. Not Addressing Audience Needs & Wants Directly
Another common mistake is to
frame your campaigns around your business and what you’re selling rather than the actual needs & wants of your audience, since the former are things you understand better and probably find easier to write or talk about with authority.
Another consequence of the Internet is how self-interested it has encouraged audiences to become, as even advertising becomes more narrowly targeted towards their specific needs and interests. Prospects now tune out faster than ever if your message does not relate to them specifically, or one of their problems you can convince them will have dire ramifications if ignored.
Resisting the urge to talk about “us” and “we” instead of “you” and “your” in your marketing campaigns is surprisingly difficult when you don’t know your audience as well as you know your product.
4. Expecting Results From Not Enough Touch Points
According to sales & marketing psychology, businesses require an average of
8 individual points of contact with prospects (or “touch points”) to turn them into paying customers.
Of course there’s occasions you’ll contact someone for the first time and they happen to be actively looking for whatever you’re selling, resulting in a sale. More commonly though, prospects need to be “warmed up” with repeated contact with your business to build enough trust for a purchase to become possible.
Many businesses make the mistake of running a campaign to a new group of prospects, and upon failing to gain a sale consider their money wasted when actually much of the value lies in the brand awareness they’ve gained – something they fail to capitalise on by never contacting that audience again, wrongly assuming if a sale isn’t there the first time it never will be.
Businesses also make the mistake of sending the same messages to new audiences they would to clients they’ve known them for years, when the needs of both may be very different. New prospects may require more information about their problem and convincing of the urgency of solving it, whereas existing customers may be more interested to know how new products differ from those already the market.
5. Not Reaching Your Audience Often Enough
Most of us live busy, information-saturated lives yet sometimes we assume the same isn’t true of our customers. Yet it is, and the result is attention spans have never been shorter & memories never poorer.
After receiving your latest marketing campaign, prospective & existing customers will forget about you almost immediately. Relying on them to think of you out of the blue of their own accord is not a sound business strategy, but how are you to know how often to contact them without experiencing a backlash?
You can ask your customers how often they’d like to be reached, perhaps as part of a survey, but a better approach is to gather hard data by segmenting your list and testing various intervals.
If you contact prospects once a week as opposed to once a month does the rate of unsubscribing go up? Do you get more complaints? How about more sales? The faster you can contact your audience repeatedly, the faster you can build the trust necessary to purchase, or turn that first purchase into a second, and so on.
6. Trying To Do Everything On Your Own
This section can be neatly summarised with the phrase “how much is your time worth?”.
Unfortunately many small businesspeople in particular are easily lulled into the habit of doing everything themselves, reluctant to either train others or rely on outsiders.
Digital marketing is a shifting quagmire of complexity, and unless you’re a marketing professional you probably have enough on your plate giving all the other areas of your business the attention they require.
There’s also great value in outside opinions, since at times we become so close to our business or products that our perspectives become distorted. Effective marketing relies on seeing things from a customer perspective, and a fresh approach from an outside party can lead to new ideas & innovations.
Marketing can be complex & confusing, so you’re welcome to Contact Us to clarify anything you’ve just read, or if you’d like to discuss how we can help you promote your business and perhaps reach a new audience.
Please feel free to browse other articles in our Marketing Blog.
