In today’s sophisticated marketplace, even with more options and opportunities to test and compare products and services, startups having been known to make some marketing mistakes. It is pertinent for businesses to develop a marketing strategy that is more authentic and people-oriented.
Check out these marketing no-no’s and ditch them:
Not defining your target audience
Defining your customer doesn’t just entail attributes like age, name, phone number, gender, and location. It means building a digital profile of what customers do everyday, who they follow, where they go, and what they like or dislike. It’s almost like playing ‘god’ with your customers’ profile.
Truth is, if you do not know who your target audience is, then you have a real problem. More significantly, if you do not have access and lack insight into the behaviour of your target audience, you will need to rectify this issue as quickly as possible.
In simple, business terms, you cannot hope to effectively sell a product or service without first identified a target audience that has a proven need for your offerings.
Building & launching products/services without a back story
If you’re a founder who simply loves to build or create services, this is an understandable mistakes. However, you’re better off as a a builder with a detailed reason for launching anything. Neglecting to nail down the story and a concrete distribution plan is a surefire way to lose a ton of money and hurting your everyone’s morale.
The simple solution is, before your team builds or launches a big new product or service, draft the blog post announcing it to the world. This ensures that you understand and communicate in clear terms how customers will get tangible value from your new product or service.
Doing it right the first time increases the likelihood of building something people in your market actually need or want.
Failure to track your ROI
Take advantage of the increased use of marketing metrics to measure the return on investment and impact of specific marketing campaigns.
Failure to capture the impact of your campaigns and record your precise ROI may be detrimental to your business. This is because you need to be informed to make decisions regarding future marketing spends and activities. You are also able to identify the most influential and effective marketing metrics to make use of.
This ensures the accuracy of your results, particularly in terms of how best to reach your audience and determining the most profitable channels.
Paying lip service to marketing
This is often reflected by the teams and employees that founders and business owners use to drive campaigns. Many startups and budding businesses do not have a standalone marketing department. The failure to employ staff members with suitable marketing skills will impact negatively on the quality of your campaigns, and their capacity to effectively target customers.
This applies also to marketing process –from the techniques used to gather important data to the translation of creative ideas into commercially viable ones.
If your business is showcasing any of these mistakes, then there is a genuine risk that you will lose ground to your competitors and may struggle to reach your sales and profit goals.
Not tracking competitors’ marketing activities
This is one mistake many small business owners ignore it completely. Keeping tabs on the marketing activities of your competitors is critical for your business growth. Find at least three other businesses like yours that are successful. Study their marketing strategies like you were back in school.
You’ll be able to understand their successes and failures once you start tracking what they do. Pay special attention to which tactics they do once, and then never repeat. Notice what tactics they keep doing month after month after month because they work.
You can leverage every one of their successes and failures. Learn from every mistake they make. You really just have to pay attention.
We hope you found these tips helpful for your business. Tell us in the comments!
