All businesses can be guilty of wasting part of the marketing budget, but it’s especially problematic for small- to medium-sized businesses, which often have smaller budgets and smaller marketing teams. There’s simply less margin for error than there is for large businesses.
Tightening up the marketing strategy and, most importantly, ensuring the common mistakes are avoided, can be a game-changer for businesses. In many cases, simply fixing the all too common errors can lead to a noticeable improvement in marketing performance, which ultimately means more money in the bank.
Targeting Everyone
You can understand why some businesses try to make their marketing efforts as broad as possible. For one thing, it’s easier to put together a catch-all marketing strategy than it is to put together one that speaks to one specific type of potential customer. It’s also easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the more people you can reach with your advertising, the more sales you’ll make.
But trying to target everyone nearly always results in no one being targeted correctly. With consumers bombarded with brand messages, only the ones that really speak to them can make it through. Building an ideal consumer profile that includes their demographics, problems, social media sites, and the language they use can provide a simple yet effective foundation for your campaigns.
Underutilizing Email Campaigns
Most brands know that they need to invest in their SEO and social media marketing. Not all of them put quite the same importance on email campaigns.
And that’s a mistake, for one simple reason: email marketing has been shown to be a highly effective marketing strategy, one that nearly always ranks right at the top of the list of best marketing ROIs.
While it can take a bit of time and effort to put together robust email campaigns that get results, there are plenty of email marketing ideas and strategies that can get your campaigns moving in the right direction. There’s also software that can automate email marketing, which is especially useful for delivering marketing emails at scale as your business grows.
Existing On All Social Media Platforms
Even if you could post content across all social media platforms, it probably wouldn’t be recommended. Each social media site has different audiences, so it would likely result in marketing spend being spent in areas where it can’t deliver an ROI.
It’s best to be selective about which social media sites you focus on. It’s much better to invest in one specific social media site and really do it right, rather than spreading yourself too thin by posting across multiple platforms.
Start by focusing on one or two platforms. Once you’ve mastered them, you can consider adding another.
Treating Onsite Content As An Afterthought
Your website’s content should be the foundation of your marketing strategy. After all, it can be extremely influential in the overall success of your marketing campaigns, not just today, but on a long-term basis. A single, quality blog post on your website can drive traffic for years.
Plus, there’s the small matter of the impact that website content has on a site’s Google ranking. Low-quality or rarely updated content means that you’ll be virtually invisible on the search engines.
It also puts too much pressure on your social media and other marketing campaigns. The best strategies are those where traffic is being sourced from multiple locations. Putting together a posting plan for your website, even if it’s just one quality post per month, ensures that aspect of your operations is doing its part.
Overlooking Analytics
Marketing budgets are tight, and it’s much better to know that the money is being spent wisely. Businesses that ignore the analytics behind their campaigns are essentially guessing with their money and hoping that it works.
The best-run marketing campaigns are ones that are continually updated based on data. What’s more, this data is generally pretty easy to access, with a host of free tools available that can make seeing how your campaigns are running a breeze. You also don’t need to spend hours interpreting the data and making adjustments (in fact, changing things too frequently is not recommended either; you need time to see if changes are working). Start by spending 60 minutes a month looking at traffic sources, content effectiveness, bounce rates, and other key metrics.
Copying Competitors’ Tactics
Don’t get us wrong: taking a look at your competitors’ marketing campaigns is recommended, but that doesn’t mean that you should copy their campaigns. There are no universal truths in marketing, and what has worked for them — and you won’t know if they have worked without accessing their data — may not work for you. A good campaign is in line with budget, brand position, and target audience, and it simply won’t be the case that yours is completely in line with your competitor.
Only Marketing When Sales Dip
It makes sense why some businesses would only ramp up their marketing efforts when sales begin to decline, and they need new customers. After all, marketing can be a good way to get new customers.
However, that approach usually requires scrambling to catch up. Marketing campaigns take time to be effective, and if you’re only investing in marketing when you want new customers, then you’ll essentially be starting from zero each time. The better approach is to keep your marketing efforts ticking along at all times, and then ramp them up when you want to be a little more aggressive. It’s much easier to go from 30mph to 60mph than from a starting position.
Only Marketing To New Customers
Finally, if there’s one marketing error we see time and time again, it’s only marketing to new customers. Your existing customers may already know and like the company, but that doesn’t mean that you’ve earned their loyalty forever. Your competitors will be trying to reach them, too. Running at least one campaign aimed at existing customers per quarter is recommended, and is often easy to do since you already have their emails.
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