When done right, marketing can offer a lucrative return on investment. But many businesses make common marketing mistakes that hinder their returns. No matter how much you’re spending on your marketing strategies, you don’t want to be wasting money or stifling your business.
Avoid common marketing mistakes and grow your business better with the information below. For a more personalised assessment, advice and services, don’t hesitate to contact our marketing specialists.
Mistake #1: Choosing the wrong marketing option
There are many different types of online and offline marketing strategies. Some of the most common are:
- Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
- Google Ads and Google Shopping Ads
- Social media marketing
- Google My Business
- Email marketing
- Flyers, posters and other forms of offline marketing
Unless you’re a big company with a significant marketing budget, you won’t be able to do all of the above. And you probably wouldn’t benefit from doing them all either.
The marketing channels you use should be chosen based on your target market. For example, if your market isn’t likely to use social media then Facebook marketing probably isn’t the best choice. Yet, lots of businesses don’t consider their market or their branding when choosing marketing strategies. This is a costly mistake to make.
Mistake #2: Marketing for leads but not conversions
Nearly all online marketing strategies will send the lead back to your website where an enquiry or sale can be made. Therefore, marketing can be seen as a two-step process:
- Marketing to get a cold lead to click on your website
- Marketing to convince the now-warm lead to enquire or buy from your website
But not enough businesses pay attention to the second step in the process. Their marketing strategy might be awesome at getting people to your website, but it might be the marketing on your website that causes those leads to drop off. There are re-marketing techniques to win them back, but it’s much better to win them over the first time around.
Some of the possible mistakes your website could be making include:
- It’s not user-friendly
- It’s not informative or the information isn’t easy to digest
- It’s slow and unresponsive
Mistake #3: Failing to track your marketing
Another common marketing mistake that can damage returns is failing to track. If you don’t monitor how your marketing is performing then you won’t be able to identify issues and make changes quickly.
We can return to the previous scenario as an example. By tracking your campaigns, you may notice that your campaign is driving significant traffic to your website. However, the data will also show that these new visitors are rarely making an enquiry or a purchase. This allows you to identify the website content as the issue, rather than changing a perfectly effective marketing campaign.
The amount of data available on most online marketing campaigns and websites is extensive. You can track almost anything, which also allows you to do some A/B testing to see what works and what doesn’t.
Mistake #4: Abandoning existing customers
When we think of marketing, we tend to think about trying to win new clients. But marketing should also be tailored to maintaining existing client. There are some facts which show the value in doing so.
First, marketing to keep existing clients is cheaper than marketing to acquire new ones. And second, existing clients already trust you and are much more likely to spend more than a new one. Of course, both are important but this stresses the need not to forget about existing clients.
However, you should market to your existing clients in a unique way. You should prioritise providing them with value rather than simply trying to get them to buy. This is often best achieved through email marketing newsletters.
