What are the most common marketing mistakes for small businesses?
One early mistake I made was to vastly over-estimate the interest my (assumed) target audience would have in a particular range of services. In a classic case of "plumber with a leaky tap", I sent out '000s of postcards offering a service no-one was interested in. Result: 3 (just three!) enquiries.
I didn't research the market and ask them :
- Do you need this service;
- Can you afford this service;
- Are you the right audience for this service?
It taught me an expensive lesson – it's not about what you DO, it's about what they GET.
What are your biggest marketing mistakes as a small business?
The biggest mistake I made was too focus too much on SEO and too little on the actual consumer.
My sites all rank without a problem, but I found adding a human element to my content made a big difference in conversions.
I did an interview with Kalkine Media on this subject - watch here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TNZMJ44aUY
Great video interview, I think you're going to get great publicity out of this, @Tom Valcanis ! @Meenu Makan and @Ryan O'Donnell , very curious to hear your stories and experiences too!
It's an ongoing problem for me, I am an engineer by profession - systems, electronics and communications. I do also hold the usual post grad business degree, but my passion for technology wins out too often and as a results I work too much IN the business and not enough ON the business. The result has been a marketing strategy without continutiy.
Marketing requires continuity - it is not advertising although advertising can be one segment of a marketing strategy.
As small business owners we need to concentrate on planned growth and that means continuous marketing: through networking, advertising, competition participation for awards, social media, web content posting, listening to thr news daily and more. So while I am busy executing SEO strategies and building websites, I should be marketing and acting as business quality cointrol, not as a design and SEO engineer. So, with a big surge of incoming business lately, I will now be maketing for future business, not eating my seedcorn, time, to fulfill work already won. Working IN a business is fulfilling current operational needs, working ON a business is building the future - and that means marketing.
I really appreciate this response, @Keith Rowley ! It makes it quite clear to me the difference between working IN and ON the business. Whereas I can work in Marketing for my business, that's not where my passion lies so I also often also drop the ball on it. What I can see is deliberately making sure there's someone on the ball, even and quite possibly often if that's not me.
One other mistake I see is thinking everyone, including myself, can do Marketing well, and trying to hold onto too much instead of allowing myself to be supported by someone I hire to do it.
As Digital Marketing Agency, we have personally seen that the most common marketing blunder is not setting your budget right at the start of your marketing campaign. A small business will always start its campaign with a limited budget, so we must use it wisely. You should always allocate a budget for every marketing strategy and not go overboard. Once you start your campaign, you should constantly check the deliverable and analyse if it meets your business goals. You will notice that some strategies might work better than others, so it will always be a good idea to allocate more budget to the strategy that works for your small business. Especially when working with Google Adwords and Social Media Paid Ads, you have to be on top of your campaign budgets, and regular monitoring and optimisation of campaigns is a must-do.
I wonder for the small businesses running their marketing on their own, what's the easiest way to set a budget and measure results. Is there a simple way to do this, @Meenu Makan ?
What I deal with is I don't even know what mistakes I am making! I know many people who find it extremely taxing to track measures, or even to figure out how to define measures easily and simply.
This also ties with another question you asked recently, @Steve Osborne , which is "at what point does doing marketing on your own gets taxing". I don't know how to answer that but I know human beings have a tendency to avoid and ignore things that are uncomfortable.
If they are out of our comfort zone, and specially not perceived as estimulating, then we are more likely to push them aside rather than face them head on.
This could be a great mistake in marketing, and certainly one I still haven't completely figured out for myself. Is that helpful?
@Keith Rowley @Blessing Ezenwa @Tom Valcanis , wanna share some of your early mistakes? ;)
I think the biggest mistake you can make is not having a go. If you are instantly grabbed by something on social media and tell yourself "I'd love to do that...but I can't" you are creating an artificial limitation on yourself. The great thing about social media (apart from you being the product) is that it's free to try - if you don't succeed at first, try something else. It only costs you your time. Social media is the great equaliser, too; progress is more compelling than anything you have to say initally.
Progress is key! That's such a great reminder, @Tom Valcanis . The earlier we fail, the better!! What were some of your early mistakes in marketing?
Steve Osborne, director at Stephen Roger Osborne
That's a very important observation Nick. So how did you actually add the human element?