Marketing Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
Even the slightest oversight in your businesses’ marketing strategy can lead to real problems down the line, which is why it’s so important you educate yourself on these common marketing mistakes and what you can do to avoid them. Check out our list of marketing mistakes and our tips on how to avoid them and improve your businesses’ performance.
Disregarding Consumer Opinions or Complaints - Better Business Practices
Sometimes the truth hurts, especially when it comes to the business you put so much effort into creating, but that doesn’t mean that you should ignore the not-so-great comments about your company. Instead, consider the feedback you get as a gift – you’re learning important information about your business that can be used to improve your overall performance.
So, roll with the punches, listen to your customers’ issues, and figure out how you can better your business. That’s not to say that all negative feedback will prove useful, but it’s important that you’re still listening to your consumers and looking at ways you can learn from their critiques.
Marketing Tips:
- Give your customers a way to provide feedback on your site.
- Look for patterns in your customer’s complaints, meaning several complaints about the same issue, and focus on ways to mend or improve accordingly.
- Make sure you provide prompt, quality customer service for your consumers when they need assistance – and this extends to social media business pages as well. One of the biggest marketing mistakes you can make is not giving your customers a way to reach out to you when they have an issue.
Focusing Exclusively on New Customer Acquisitions and Overlooking Repeat Customers
Gaining a larger customer base is always a key priority, but one of the marketing mistakes a lot of businesses make is forgetting to show their already-established customers any appreciation. For example, a lot of brands introduce great deals to draw in consumers, but most times these sales are exclusively for new customers, meaning that those who’ve been long-time customers are excluded.
It’s just as important to maintain your relationship with long-time customers as it is to draw in new ones, especially given that a around 80% of sales will come from your existing consumer base.
Marketing Tips:
- Make sure that all your sales aren’t only for first-time customers. Encouraging first timers to try your services or products is perfectly fine, but don’t always make every single sale you have exclude your returning customers.
- Show appreciation to long-time customers using emails or written cards. Whether it be for a holiday or to celebrate a milestone in how long they’ve been using your services, a small gesture like this just to say “Thanks for choosing us” will go a long way. If you’re feeling especially appreciative, you can even provide a coupon along with your message.
Making Big Changes to Your Brand Too Quickly
Yes, change is good…but so many businesses make the mistake of taking their long-established products or brand and completely reinventing them, and their marketing campaign, as a means to grow their consumer base. Successfully pulling this off is rare, since your existing consumers likely enjoy what you already have to offer as well as the way your business markets itself. If you want to make changes to your company or products, make sure you do so gradually, and don’t completely remove the features that made you so popular with consumers in the first place.
As was previously stated, however, change is still good – which means that you also shouldn’t completely avoid changes to your brand or adapting your marketing strategy. All companies go through a stale point in their lifetime, but the ones that succeed in evolving understand that evolution is done gradually, not overnight.
Marketing Tips:
- Research what people like most about your brand before you consider what to change. You can even create polls or surveys that customers can take to get a better idea of what’s popular and what you could safely make changes to.
- Look at marketing trends with successful businesses similar to yours to analyze what’s worked and what hasn’t with their past marketing campaigns. It’s a great way to gain some insight on what works before you proceed with a new marketing strategy.
Neglecting Your Business Website
When people are trying to scope out a business or product to see if it suits their needs, they usually go straight to Google, meaning that having a website that shows off your products and services is essential if you want to reach consumers and encourage them to shop with you.
If you don’t have a business website, or you have a site that’s out-of-date or lacks content, you’re likely losing sales to pretty much any other business that has established a website and is actively marketing that site online.
Marketing Tips:
- Seek help from a professional web developer to help you build a website for your business. While there are plenty of website builder service out there that offer an easy method of building a site yourself, their pre-made templates won’t afford you the same uniqueness that a built-from-scratch website would.
- If you already have a website and just need some style and layout changes made, look for a good web designer to help you spiffy up your site.
Not Marketing to the Right Audience
One of the other big marketing mistakes a lot of businesses make early on is trying to market their products or services before determining who their target audience is. This is often a costly, ineffective method of reaching consumers, especially when what you’re selling will only appeal to a specific type of consumer.
If you’re a retailer like Rue21 that sells teen’s apparel, for example, marketing to adults and seniors wouldn’t make much sense, would it? It’s important that you focus your marketing efforts on the appropriate audience.
Marketing Tips:
- During the development phase of your marketing strategy, really consider who your brand is going to benefit or appeal to most, then research marketing trends for this specific group to gain a better understanding of what type of marketing will attract them more.
- Research your target audiences’ online habits. Look at what social media sites they use and what online trends they’re gravitating towards, then use that information to create the right marketing strategy.
Not Forming a Marketing Strategy for Your Business
In a perfect world, a great product or service would sell itself with little to no effort – but in the real world that’s not going to be the case. If you don’t have a marketing strategy to reach consumers, no matter how amazing your brand may be, you’re going to lose out on business to companies that are putting in the time and effort to market themselves.
Marketing Tips:
- Always market your business, even if you don’t have the budget for a grand marketing campaign – figure out what your budget is for marketing and utilize what you have to ensure your business is getting the attention it needs to draw in consumers.
Not Optimizing Your website for Other Devices
There’s nothing more frustrating than trying to navigate a site on your phone that’s strictly optimized for pc. It looks bad, is difficult to use, and sometimes won’t even work at all. Additionally, since people have access to their cellphones far more than a desktop computer or laptop, it doesn’t make sense to have a website that isn’t optimized to facilitate mobile use. Marketing mistakes like this will cost you business.
Marketing Tips:
- Try navigating your site using your own mobile device to see how it operates or use Google’s mobile-friendly testing tool to make sure your site isn’t already mobile-friendly.
- Make sure your site features a responsive design, meaning that it looks good and renders properly on different devices. Making a website responsive involves some coding, so you may need some help from a web developer to update your website if you don’t have experience working with code.
Not Marketing on Social Media
Businesses that don’t use any form of social media to market their brand automatically put themselves at a disadvantage. Social media is a great place to gain exposure for your brand, advertise your products, and receive feedback from your consumers.
A business page, like personal pages, is free to create on social media and most platforms offer a plethora of free or cost-effective marketing tools you can use to reach your target audience.
Marketing Tips:
- Before you start marketing on social media, look at what platforms would work best for marketing your type of business and what platforms your audience are using most.
- Check out social media pages for businesses similar to yours and see what type of content on their page is gaining the most likes and shares. While you shouldn’t copy everything your competitors do to get attention online, learning what’s working for them can help shed some light on what type of content performs best for your business type on social media.
Not Using SEO in Your Online Content
Search engine optimization (SEO) is important because it not only helps guide consumers to your site when they search keywords or phrases related to your businesses, but it also helps Google’s algorithm decide how relevant your content is to a specific topic and where it should be placed among Google searches.
Without proper SEO, potential customers will likely never even see your business site on their Google searches when looking for products or businesses like yours – and your chance of making it to page 1 of Google searches, featured snippets, or the top result slot drops to zero. Any content past page 2 on Google is fighting an uphill battle for clicks…and it’s a very steep hill. Not optimizing your content for search engines is one of the biggest mistakes you can make if you’re looking to boost your web traffic.
Marketing Tips:
- Establish a primary and secondary keyword for each page, then develop content around these keywords. A primary keyword should directly describe what the page features, while a secondary keyword is closely related to the primary keyword, but ads a bit more context to help a search engine better understand what your page is about and where it should rank. There are numerous keyword search tools online that can help you determine which keywords would work best for your business.
- Build quality backlinks to your site by developing relationships with the right websites online. There’s a lot of ways this can be done, but a common method is by reaching out to webmasters and explaining what your site is all about and how linking to it would benefit their users.
Trying to Market Your Business Alone
While there are a plethora of advice blogs and helpful articles (like this) on the internet for novices looking to market their business, it doesn’t mean that following a step-by-step from every online marketing source you find will guarantee your success.
Professional marketers know how the marketing industry flows, how it changes, and how to adapt a businesses’ marketing strategy accordingly.
Marketing Tips:
- If you’re feeling overwhelmed with trying to market your Tacoma-based business, don’t try to go it alone and make these marketing mistakes in the process – give our top rated marketing experts at Olive Group a call and schedule your free marketing meeting today!