Top Marketing Mistakes To Avoid

When Marketing Begins to go Wrong: Top Easy-to-make Mistakes that you Need to Avoid

Marketing is the lifeblood of any sustainable business

Companies know this and spend tonnes of time, energy, and money in employing different marketing strategies. However, these strategies don’t always bring in expected and profitable results in the form of more traffic, more customers, more money, and increased customer loyalty. For small businesses and startups, the problem is especially frustrating because they have a cap on the financial and human resources that they can use.

Companies know this and spend tonnes of time, energy, and money in employing different marketing strategies. However, these strategies don’t always bring in expected and profitable results in the form of more traffic, more customers, more money, and increased customer loyalty. For small businesses and startups, the problem is especially frustrating because they have a cap on the financial and human resources that they can use.

The missing key is being smart and strategic and implementing techniques thoughtfully by examining which ones will have the greatest ROI. Part of that smartness and strategicness is to be as knowledgeable about what not to do as it is to be about what to do.

Hence, it’s time now to fill those knowledge gaps, learn the most common marketing mistakes that you might be unknowingly making, and get on the path to rectifying them for a profitable and successful business.

The What-Not-To-Do-In-Marketing Guide

Not marketing yourself

This mistake sometimes arises out of fear, especially for people and businesses starting out. Putting yourself on the line, speaking about your product or service, making a case for yourself, are all nerve-wracking. Most business owners, hence, end up marketing very half-heartedly which is not going to be effective at all.

The other reason for making this mistake might be the assumption that ‘people will find my product.’

Truth is: people aren’t going to learn about what you offer unless you tell them. The brands and companies that everyone knows about, reached where they are due to an excellent quality product and dogges marketing efforts to tell the world about its excellence.

The market is already saturated with people from all over the world creating and selling all kinds of products and services that humankind would ever need. In such a scenario, if you don’t make it a point to stand up and tell the world about what you offer… you are actually stealing from the people who would benefit from your service.

This ties into the next mistake….

Not taking the time to know your ideal client

If you are talking to everyone in the market, you are talking to no one really.

This is akin to mistake #1 albeit in a different form. ‘Market and the right people will find you’. No, they won’t. Your modus operandi should be: ‘market to the right people and they might end up staying.’

And who are these right people? Someone who would derive great value from your product.

For this, you need to actually sit down and think hard. What kind of person would buy your product? What are their needs? How do they see the world? What do they spend their time doing?

These questions will help you to market to an actual human instead of in a void. Additionally, it will help you to craft authentic campaigns that make the customer feel as if you just stepped in their brain and then helped solve a problem. By the end of it, you would have won them over.

Not leveraging your USP

Once you know your ideal customer and have pulled them in, the plan of action is to offer them a solution in a way that no one has. This will originate from your unique strengths and capabilities a.k.a your USP.

Your USP is what sets you apart in the market. Because, as pointed above, there are already thousands of businesses operating in every imaginable domain. There is always someone with a better quality product, a cheaper price, a discount offer, and sometimes all three.

So you need to sit and think. What sets you apart in the market? What is your USP? What will help you to stand out from the crowd and get chosen?

Not focusing on retaining old traffic while bringing in new one

Some businesses make the mistake of trying to pull in new customers at the cost of cross-selling or up-selling to their previous group of customers.

Your existing customers already know your value, have a relationship with you, and are more likely to buy from you. The amount of energy that you have to invest in them is a lot less than what you have to invest in new ones.

According to Marketing Metrics, a customer who has previously made a purchase from you is 60% more likely to purchase from you again. In contrast, the chances of a first-time visitor to your website making the same purchase are only 20%.

So, as you seek to expand your market and your reach, don’t forget to walk your existing clientele with you. Keep in constant touch with them and communicate that you value their presence. It’ll pay off in the long run.

Not focusing on website because of social-media

With the popularity of social media, the rise of influencer marketing, and the fact that everyone, has an account on a social media channel, has encouraged most people to ditch their websites in favor of a social media account.

This is akin to building your business on rented land. You can’t help when the price of the land goes up.

Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn- none of them are owned by you. They are controlled by other folks who care about their business and not yours. So when the algorithm updates or policies are changed, you are always vulnerable to being negatively impacted.

Your organic reach might decrease, you might have to create ads with a set minimum budget that might be more than your budget, or video ads might be given more outright preference than display ads.

You cannot control any of these consequences. Social media is great for finding new customers and driving a few sales, but to rely on it entirely for running your business is foolhardy.

Your primary focus should be on your website only. Best to build your home on a piece of land that you bought where you get to make the rules.

Not including call to actions (CTAs)

At the end of the day, all your efforts are geared towards a particular action: getting the customer to buy from you, to book you, or to hire you. To simply include you as a value-providing part of their life.

A beautifully designed email about your latest course is of no use if, after reading it, the subscriber has no clear way to sign up for it. Hence, your every conversation with the customer should prompt them to take action and say ‘hell, yes!’ to you.

CTAs become even more crucial on your website. The customer needs to spend time with you so that they can go through your content, gauge if it is of value, and eventually, come to trust you.

How to get them to stay with you? By integrating CTAs on different pages. A synonym for it would be internal linking.

So, sprinkle these links and CTAs all over your website. At the end of the article, you could display the related posts. Or tell them to check out a course which further expands on the information provided. After they sign up for your email newsletter, you can direct them to your archives.

CTAs work well on other mediums, too. According to AdRoll, adding CTAs to your FB page increases click-through rates (CTRs) by 285%. When Brafton made changes for a client by adding CTA buttons to article templates, their revenue increased by 83% in one month.

Take action and include some calls to actions now!

The above are just a few of the mistakes and entrepreneurs and business owners make during their marketing efforts. The sooner they are rectified, the sooner revenue begins to flow in and customer loyalty begins to go up. Which business wouldn’t like more of these, right?

So, go into introspection mode as soon as possible, call a meeting with your team post that, and make plans to become the next marketing legend in business!

Looking in the Crystal Ball: Top 3 Marketing Trends for 2019

Looking in the Crystal Ball: Top 3 Marketing Trends for 2019

As each year goes by and technology evolves, consumer behavior does, too. And with a change in the preferences and behaviors of customers, a business must also change its modus operandi.

What worked for you as a company just 2 years back, won’t work now. Sure, there are some timeless principles, but the form in which they are applied and leveraged continues to evolve as new and more engaging ways of conveying information emerge. And if you don’t adapt, your customer acquisition and retention rates might nosedive to their death.

That being said, below are the top 3 marketing trends for 2019 that you must know if you want to be a hit with your audience this year and rack up those precious profitable numbers:

Content is still King

With an abundance of businesses on the internet, content is one of the things that will make you stand out from the crowd and allow audiences to connect to you.

Nike is a true King when it comes to content. Although it sells sportswear, Nike will never upload an advert with a picture of the latest athletic wear and its price. The power of its marketing lies in the visuals and sentences that talk of women breaking stereotypes, men triumphing in spite of disability, children growing up to become heroes.

In short- a plethora of empowering content that makes people want to buy Nike gear because they want to be that hero, that achiever, and the one who overcame the odds. Nike makes them believe through its content that if they #justdoit, they will be that person. Buying Nike shoes almost seems like a no-brainer then.

Another winner at content is TED.  5 million people have subscribed to watching these 18-minute videos. If you have ever surfed YouTube, you would have watched or been suggested to watch one of these, too.

Their secret? The fire-catching phrase ‘Ideas worth spreading’. The conferences they hold, the people they invite, the initiatives they launch (TEDx, TED Fellows) are all geared to ‘ideas worth spreading’. They simply want to make content that people love. Their audience feels it, loves it, and TED keeps rolling out more awesomeness.

And hence, content is not just blog posts. Looking to the example that TED sets, anything that your company rolls out on and off the Internet counts as content.

Your website copy? Content. Guest post on a high-traffic tech website? Content. BTS Instagram stories? Content. The videos of the conferences that you hold? It’s all content, and you simply cannot compromise on it.

Quality is of paramount importance and people can detect it quite easily. Audiences do not want to be directly sold to even if they know that’s exactly what’s happening. According to the Economist Group’s report ‘Missing The Mark’ 71% of buyers/ readers were turned off by content that seemed like a sales pitch.

Hence, when you are creating content, make sure to emphasize on quality. A repertoire of creative content that resonates with people will build a more loyal audience than any amount of paid ads will.

Data will not be for computer scientists alone

What gets measured, gets improved’ is not for self-improvement junkies only.

Tracking is an essential practice for all businesses, and when it comes to your marketing campaigns, it is absolutely essential that you measure how much you invest and the returns you reap on those investments. Else, you might end up making the same mistakes whether it is 2009 or 2019.

Hence, using data for increasingly personalized interaction and to provide top-notch customer care experiences is going to be a major marketing strategy in 2019.

Data is going to help you answer critical questions like: how is your product performing? How are customers engaging with it? What are they responding well to? What are they not responding to at all? Getting answers to these questions will help you direct your future marketing efforts.

And notwithstanding common security concerns, consumers are willing to share their personal data if it means a better customer experience is the end result of it.

Using data will also help you to segment your customers. Again, this will help you to make the right offers to them at the right time on the basis of profession, age, demographics, past purchasing history, and other insightful numbers.

Stacy Martinet, VP of marketing strategy and communication at Adobe, told CMO.com: “A data-driven approach to creativity helps marketers work more productively, create the right content faster, and deliver that content to the right customer, across the right channels, at the right time”.

No reason to not get involved in those numbers.

Videos on the rise

According to Animoto, videos are consumers no. 1 favorite type of branded content on social media. If you embed a video on your landing page, it can drive up conversions by 80% or more.

In a Q3 2018 Earning Calls, Mark Zuckerberg himself said that “Video is a critical part of the future, it’s what our community wants, and as long as we can make it social I think it will end up being a large part of our business as well.”

Numbers related to Facebook Stories and Facebook Watch, released by MarketingLand, reveal that 62% of people were more interested in a brand after watching a video about it whereas more than 50% of people said they make more online purchases as a result of Stories.

LinkedIn is also on the way to becoming a marketing hub, especially for B2B enterprises. According to official stats, video is shared 20x more than any other type of content on the LinkedIn feed.

On the other hand, if you are a B2C enterprise, Instagram stories might help you since 400 million people watch these Stories every day and 48% of consumers have made a purchasing decision after watching a brand’s video there.

And how can we forget YouTube? The video giant has over a billion users which are 1/3rd of the internet population. These people watch more than 500 million hours of video on YouTube.

The point that all these numbers are making? No matter which platform you use for sharing videos, rest assured that people are going to stop and watch it. But since it is also a form of content, you gotta remember- its quality is of paramount importance. Do not compromise on it, and you’ll have cracked a large part of the successful content marketing code.

Conclusion

These 3 trends are primarily geared towards 2 objectives: forming a relationship with the customer and becoming a brand that they want to associate themselves with. Though not always quantitative, the results of these 2 objectives will make you an ace player of the long-run.

What are you waiting for now? It’s time to call a meeting with your marketing team asap and discuss your strategy for 2019. The clock is ticking and your campaigns are waiting to be a success.