All businesses need to market themselves, no matter the industry. Though marketing is based on a variety of factors, making mistakes in marketing will affect all aspects of your business, especially its profitability.
Avoid these five common mistakes and you should realise a higher return on your marketing investments.
Lack of Strategy
It is amazing how many businesses, especially smaller ones, assume that they have a marketing strategy just because they are doing the fundamentals. Though executing on any marketing plan is important, a strategy is a roadmap that will help you when you are struggling, not just succeeding.
A lack of time spent on your marketing strategy will harm your business. Always try to go the extra mile. For example, if you’re a video game developer marketing through Twitch, you need to work on how to get Twitch followers to notice your game more actively.
Lack Of A Budget
Marketing uses up two of the most valuable resources of any business: time and money. With a budget, you can decide how much money you are willing to dedicate to each of your tactics arising from your marketing strategy.
There are two ways to become more profitable —increase revenue and decrease expenses. If you do not have a clue about expenses, your business will make more mistakes because resources are not properly allocated.
Lack Of A Product or Service
This may be overstating the obvious, but as a business, you are either producing a product or providing a service. If you do neither, you are not in business. I had a prospect, who had been a chef for many years and he asked me to help him start a restaurant.
Since I have never cooked professionally, I asked him to come up with a menu before beginning to craft ideas on how we would serve our product. He wanted to have a theme and learn how to cook around that theme.
I did not continue to help him because he could not offer a product for the marketplace. Know what you are offering and why.
Not Knowing Your Target Market
Any business that assumes that everyone and anyone is a customer is wrong. When I worked in market research, there were clients who produced consumer goods, who assumed anyone with disposable income was a potential customer.
That was so far from the truth because so many people will never have an interest in a product.
If that were the case, everyone would buy sliced bread every time they stop at a supermarket. One great example is trying to market beer to elderly women. They may buy a six or 12 pack on occasion, but do not expect them to buy beer by the keg.
Promoting Through Word-Of-Mouth Marketing
I recently tried the food of a food truck because their trailer parks across the street from our apartment almost nightly. Since I enjoyed it, I started telling my colleagues, who happen to work down the street from my apartment.
The food truck’s sit-down restaurant in the neighborhood has had dozens of reviews on websites such as Yelp! and TripAdvisor, which are overwhelmingly positive.
As a business person, ask your customers to use services such as Yahoo! Local, social media, and other online services to get word-of-mouth out to prospects and leads.