15th Aug 2019

5 Costly Marketing Mistakes

To be successful in today’s marketplace, you must have strong marketing skills, there is no room for ineffective marketing plans. Today’s marketplace is bursting with the competition, therefore a stellar marketing plan is required to make you stand out from the crowd. Taking risks in business can be daunting, sometimes they pay off, others they don’t. Here are 5 costly marketing mistakes and how to avoid them.

 

Missing Your Target Audience

This common mistake has proven to be costly to many businesses throughout time. A business that misses its target audience will find it difficult to convert leads to sales. Such businesses may find self-sustainability difficult to come by. To avoid missing your target audience, determine who they are and how best to reach them before you commence with the marketing of your products or services. Brainstorm your audiences pain points, and how your product can solve those issues. Remember that you’ll never be able to properly market to an audience that you don’t understand. When you identify your target audience, increase your efforts to connect and engage them. Your business will surely benefit.

 

Tone-deaf Campaigns

Tone-deaf campaigns do not consider the sensitivities of your audience. You will only aggrieve a large section of your audience by using such marketing tactics. This is not good for your brand as you will be put under the spotlight for the wrong reasons and vilified. To avoid this costly marketing mistake ensure that all campaigns are in tune with your content strategy and company values. Before tuning into any recent development, ensure that you visit your drawing board to check if the campaign goes in line with the objective of the brand. Sticking close to your brand objective, encouraging a diverse marketing team, extensively reviewing your campaign and being thoughtful will help avoid this pitfall.

 

Inconsistency

As you commence your marketing campaign, you must ensure that your efforts consistently adhere to the identity of your brand. Your brand tells your target audience who you are, what you stand for, how you propose to solve their problems and why you should be picked over anyone else. It speaks for you when you are not present in the room.

Avoid confusion by practicing consistency throughout all your marketing campaigns. When you lose customers as a result of sending the wrong message, the identity of your brand will take a huge hit, which will require time and hard work to rebuild. Once the image of your brand is established, stick to it. Relay consistent messages, colours, images, fonts to help your target customers identify you.

 

Blending In

Many businesses fall into the trap of blending in without knowing that it is a costly marketing mistake. As a result of blending in, their audience cannot tell them apart from the competition. Nothing compels you to pick their brand over another. To avoid making this mistake, you have to create an identity for your brand. This involves projecting clearly why you stand out from the pack. Is it your price? Or the exclusiveness of your product? Or its composition, packaging or even a reward system attached to it? You have to tell your audience why you are the right choice.

 

Starting Without a Plan

If you fail to plan, you have inadvertently planned to fail. Without a proper marketing plan, your brand stands to suffer from loss of time, money, human resources, etc. The absence of a plan will reduce the conversion of leads, make the production of contents difficult and the consistency in branding will suffer as well. To avoid this costly mistake, plan your marketing strategy, document it and stick to it! Ensure that every member of your team is well involved and is familiar with your objectives. This will ensure consistency across the table when setting a campaign.

 

There is no doubt that these 5 costly marketing mistakes will set any brand back. Still, it is not entirely doom and gloom as you are better positioned to avoid the pitfalls. After all, said and done, every business owner knows their brand will face triumphs and failures. To avoid paying the price, you just have to ensure that you avoid these 5 costly marketing mistakes.