10 of the biggest marketing mistakes businesses make

1. Not planning

Many businesses can make the mistake of diving into marketing without any form of strategy, this could be detrimental for your business. You need to carefully plan what you need to do in order to achieve results, without a marketing plan you have no idea who you’re trying to appeal to and how to appeal to them. Having a solid plan allows you to understand how you want to portray your business and to which audience.

2. Ignoring social media

Social media is an important way of marketing your business, it offers you a chance to speak to your customers, promote your products and also allows you to develop your brand. Having a social media account also gives you a larger online presence, if you choose to ignore social media, it means your website can only be found through search engines, which really narrows down how customers can find you. 

3. Ignoring email marketing

Although many believe that email marketing is seen as outdated you shouldn’t ignore it. Email marketing is great for a number of reasons, it lets you directly address the customer, you can track it, it’s cheap and it can be directed at many people. It really is a useful marketing tool and without it, you could really limit yourself and your business.

4. Pay attention to detail

Keep an eye out for typos, grammatical errors or any other issue that might portray your business as unprofessional or negatively. If you don’t pay attention to the little things online, then potential customers may think that you’re not going to pay attention to details when offering a service or a sale. Always have someone proofread your work, both online and in print.

5. Trying to appeal to everyone

Never try to appeal to everyone, know your audience and who you should be trying to target. Find your target audience, research your niche market and promote yourself in a way that will appeal to them instead of simply trying to please everyone, which can never be done.

6. Unrealistic ideas for SEO

Search Engine Optimisation is a complex thing and although if done correctly and over time, can have great results, it isn’t always going to work straight away. SEO takes time, it’s unrealistic to expect results straight away and expecting too much too soon can lead to frustrating and may even lead to becoming disheartened.

7. Using too many social media accounts

Whilst having social media accounts is important to your business, make sure you don’t have too many. Keep the basics, Facebook and Twitter and possibly another such as Pinterest or Instagram, however any more and you my find yourself really struggling to find the time to update your social media accounts. It’s better having fewer accounts and quality content over have lot’s of social media accounts and very poor content.

8. Boring copy

If the copy on your website is boring, it’s unlikely that anyone will enjoy being your website. Customers don’t want to read a boring website and if they aren’t interested in the first two sentences it’s likely they aren’t going to continue reading the rest of the site. Make sure to keep your copy interesting, whether it’s the text on your website, your blog or your social media.

9. Not keeping track of your online reputation

You need to keep track of your reputation, whether it be on social media, on Yelp, on their personal blog or elsewhere on the internet, it’s good to keep an eye on what others are saying about you. Obviously you aren’t always going to please everyone but it’s good to get an idea of why customers aren’t happy so that you can understand how you can change things in the future so that other customers won’t feel the same.

10. Believing that marketing is an expense not an investment

Ultimately marketing is an investment, if you choose to believe that marketing is just some unnecessary expense rather than an investment that will genuinely benefit your company then be prepared for poor results. If you really want to drive traffic to your website and make sales then marketing is needed, don’t be fooled into thinking otherwise.