Getting Started: The Common Pitfalls To Avoid In Marketing
Starting a business is not an easy feat. With all the hours and money you invest, it is only natural to expect results as quickly as possible. But before you get there, you need to recognize how marketing is a crucial part of your success. You should have a clear understanding of what marketing is and isn’t.
Below are the common pitfalls to avoid in marketing.
Confusing Marketing with Sales
Marketing increases the chances of a sale but does not guarantee it.
While sales is important, marketing is a powerful tool that can achieve more than that. The results you can get from marketing are broad, like increase in awareness, better engagement, empowerment, or a significant growth to your customer value.
Although marketing campaigns can help with your ROI, it is important to take into account your sales team, logistics, customer service, and product. Thus, relying on marketing alone with zero follow through in other aspects is futile.
You Do Not Know Your Audience
As an entrepreneur, you must have seen a problem that needs addressing. Hence, the creation of your products or services.
Your primary target market consists of your key buyers that have the potential to be repeat customers. For example, a vegetarian restaurant may serve every customer, but its main market are still the vegetarians.
Understanding and determining your target audience is not a one-and-done process. In-depth market research and analysis are necessary. This requires tapping and investing on your marketing intelligence, which is the backbone of every strategy you create.
Establishing your Who, What, Why, and Where will guide you in all your branding and marketing efforts. Do keep in mind that as your business develops, targets may expand and change too.
You Lack Consistency
Aside from not knowing your target market, many businesses lack consistency. It is difficult to strike a balance in a world that is fast-paced and overloaded with information.
Consistency is vital in getting your company out there. That said, the lack of awareness may slow down your growth, but this doesn’t mean that you should bombard your audience with ads and information. Everything, including marketing, should be done in moderation.
Track your target audience’s behavior and experiment. Learn when they are most active online to identify when and where to place your ads. How much is too many? What keywords and phrases are they searching for?
All of these tie-up with knowing your audience.
You Are Everywhere
Marketing is broad and can be a tad overwhelming to follow. With platforms online and offline, it can be confusing where to start.
Many brands, who are pressured with the influx of channels, would start setting up tens of social media accounts to stay current. But, doing so will make you lose focus.
After identifying your audience, map out your customer’s journey to see how you can tap them at every point. Where are your customers looking? What are they exposed to on a daily basis? Do they listen to the radio while driving on the way to work? Or are they hooked on Spotify instead?
Spreading yourself too thin is never a wise move. Be smart when allocating your resources.
You Resist Change
Change is inevitable, yet many dread it. In business, this involves re-strategizing, investing more money, evolving products and services, and hiring more assets. All of these are done in hopes for better results.
This is evident when you start promoting your brand to your audience. Reaching out requires the use of multiple media vehicles that are always evolving. From traditional TV to Netflix, newspapers to websites, and in-person meetings to chats, the changes in marketing tools are fast-paced and sometimes hard to predict.
For these reasons, each platform follow a different communication style based on their audience. You also need to deliver unique content in different formats. A visual-focused platform, like Instagram, needs more engaging images than texts.
Ideologies change. Customer behavior changes. Social trends change.
Your marketing strategy should be fluid and align with your audience as they progress. Adapting to changes in your goals and having a pulse on where you should be are vital to your success. Sooner, you’ll be setting the trend.
Customer Service Matters
As mentioned earlier, marketing is a significant cog in your organization. It affects your company beyond promotion and sales.
Make your marketing efforts count and follow through with an excellent customer experience . Your ultimate goal is to foster loyalty among your customers where you can create a community.
A consistent flow of new customers is great, but a community of loyal customers through excellent customer service is even better. In the long run, they can help you put your brand out there and effectively reduce the customer touch points when converting people into buyers. It is the most cost-effective form of marketing your brand.
Once you get a solid following, only then can you refocus your marketing strategy and address other goals.
Marketing Is Not Free
Money makes money.
Marketing involves a lot of experimenting before you can have the perfect formula. That said, allocating a marketing budget is important. Established brands didn’t make it to the top after only a year or two of promotions.
Even if you hire the best marketing practitioners, a lack of support will make their efforts futile. Ads, tools, website maintenance, and most importantly, marketing intelligence needs consistent funding.
If you have observed each pitfall mentioned, these are caused by having a poor understanding of your market. But, good data costs money too.
A word to the wise, start setting aside 5% of your company budget for marketing.
In order for your business to have a symbiotic relationship with your customers, marketing is needed to bridge the gap. As such, regarding marketing as an investment will serve you more than you expect.