Top 10 Mistakes in Marketing that Businesses Make

20% of businesses fail within the first year. That number just goes up as you enter the 5-year mark of the business as well.

Part of the reason why businesses fail is that they do not know the proper marketing techniques that they need. For instance, SEO is an extremely important part of marketing businesses online, and without it, your website marketing techniques will likely fail.

Ready to learn about what mistakes to avoid? Keep reading!

1. Forgetting About the Brand

Many businesses forget that part of the digital marketing technique is about creating a brand, not just generating leads and sales.

Eventually, this will just lead to failure since nothing is backing the sales. Customers will want more from you as the company, not just your products.

To build a brand, focus on creating a web design that is optimized with SEO. Creating a social media marketing focus will also help to create a brand name for the business that customers will begin to respond to.

2. Being Unclear About How You Stand Out

There’s a reason that every business that successfully operates is still operating. It is because they stand out in a certain way.

As a new business owner, it’s important to know how your business stands out. Once you have a general idea of how you are unique or different, you can incorporate this into your digital marketing strategy.

3. Not Narrowing Down Your Target Audience

You cannot market to everyone.

Sports companies can only market to people who like sports. Beauty brands can only market to people who love to use makeup, hair supplies, or other beauty products.

If these businesses try to market to other people, they will not generate any leads or any business. This will eventually lead to them failing since all marketing efforts were not targeted to the audience that would become customers.

4. Ignoring the Competition

Obviously, as a business, you don’t like your competition, but the last thing you want to do is ignore the competition.

Keeping an eye on your competitors can actually help you in a lot of ways. If your competitors are doing well as a business, they can give you insight into what they are doing that is working. You can then follow in their footsteps or come up with even more unique ways to go about how you do things.

So how do you know what they are doing? Using social media can be a great way to figure out what is happening with your competitors and their business.

5. Not Analyzing Your Metrics

Analyzing data is one of the most important things you can do for your business strategy.

If you don’t analyze, you won’t know what is working with your digital marketing strategy and what is not. You want to be able to analyze to then reflect and restrategize your plan.

A few things you should analyze with your marketing strategy:

• Social media metrics
• Lead generation
• How you are receiving online traffic to your website
• If your SEO and keywords are driving traffic to the site

There are many other things you should analyze for your business, but a lot of it depends on which parts you are focusing on.

6. Underestimating Word-of-Mouth Advertising

Not all of your marketing has to be done online. While website marketing is a large part of advertising, you can also advertise in other ways as well.

For instance, word-of-mouth advertising is not outdated. Advertising with business cards in coffee shops or fliers in breweries can still drive traffic to your business and create leads.

7. Forgetting to Focus on Retaining Customers

One thing that a lot of businesses forget about is the retention of customers, not just trying to get new ones.

Once you have customers, you have to keep them around. Much like dating, you can’t just start dating and expect the rest to follow if you do nothing to nurture it. The same goes for leading a business.

So how can you make sure that you focus on retention and not just the addition of customers? Try the following:

• Consistently send emails to current customers about promos, sales, or events you are having
• Ask for customer feedback and act on it
• Continue to provide customer service that customers enjoy

8. Creating Low-Quality Marketing

It can be tempting to get started with your marketing strategy right away, but if you rush it, your marketing is going to come across as low-quality to many. This can be an automatic turn-off.

Instead of rushing, it is better to not have anything until you are ready to have high-quality marketing tools.

When creating photos, videos, graphics, or anything else used for marketing, it needs to show customers that they can trust you because of the care you put into the marketing. It shows you’ll care for their needs as well.

9. Not Budgeting For Marketing

It can be easy to throw all of your budget into the business side of things, but without proper marketing techniques, your business will not go anywhere.

To avoid that, make sure to include your digital marketing strategy in your budget.

10. Lack of Consistency

The last thing you want to avoid when marketing is being inconsistent. This gives the wrong impression about your company and business to current and potential customers.

Whether consistent means sending a weekly email or posting daily on your social media, showing up with consistency sends a message of trust and loyalty to customers.

A Focus on SEO and Marketing

Marketing a brand takes much more than just starting a business. You have to create a strategy that works. This should include optimizing a web design for SEO, using social media marketing and other digital marketing techniques, and staying true to your brand the entire time.

If all of this marketing jargon seems impossible to keep up with, you can reach out to us to help you with any of your digital marketing needs!