When marketing your product or service, you must understand your audience, the message you want to deliver, the offer you’re willing to make, and the optimal timing for your marketing campaign.
Too often, novice marketers, even marketing veterans, make costly mistakes that result in poor performance in their marketing campaigns.
You can avoid common marketing mistakes with adequate planning, attention to detail, and ongoing measurement and evaluation.
If you’re considering a traditional marketing campaign, a digital marketing campaign, or something new, try to avoid these common marketing mistakes.
Timing
You may have a great list, a fantastic offer, and even a well-designed marketing piece, but if your timing is off, so will your results be. As an experienced copywriter, I have seen some costly marketing campaigns that were very compelling. However, they failed to produce results.
This is because the campaign reached consumers at a time when they had no interest in buying the product. For example, selling snow shovels in July would not be good timing.
Failure to Test Your Headline
As the first thing your prospect usually reads, the headline is essential for luring your prospective buyer into the message, offer, and action you want them to take.
Regardless of the medium, you should continually test your headlines (or subject lines) by running split tests and evaluating responses. This ensures that your marketing message attracts the largest number of prospective buyers.
Failure to Test Your Offer
In direct marketing, the offer directly correlates to 40% of your response. If you have the right offer, people respond. There are other factors to consider as well, but providing a compelling proposition is essential.
Offers can range from discounts to “hurry while supplies last”, but the commonality remains. Test your offers for the optimal response.
Having a Good List
There must be more than just having the best offer and award-winning design.
Success is often directly tied to having a targeted email list. With today’s sophisticated lead generation tools, you can highly segment your lists based on demographics, psychographics, buying behaviour, and many other characteristics.
The key here is not to be penny-wise and pound-foolish. If you’re wondering where to invest your marketing £££, spend them on developing a good list.
Relying on a Single Communication
On average, consumers are hit with over 2,000 marketing messages daily.
In fact, recent studies have indicated that consumers need to see your marketing message an average of 27 times before they take notice. If there is any truth to the claim in part or whole, you must communicate with prospects regularly.
Placing a single ad on Facebook or sending a single email cannot deliver effective results.
Determine where your ideal clients or customers hang out to gather information and develop an ongoing campaign that works within your budget.
Not Measuring Campaign Effectiveness
Over time, your business is going to do a lot of marketing. Even if you are a small business wondering how you will communicate to a prospective audience, you will eventually have some type of communication.
Regardless of the marketing campaign size or expense, you need to track your results. You can do this with a simple spreadsheet or a multi-million pound CRM system.
The bottom line is that you need to record what works and what doesn’t to improve your future results.
Failure to Continue the Dialogue
After working with many businesses, I’m still amazed at how many fail to communicate with customers on an ongoing basis.
Consumers or businesses often hear from the seller when it’s time to buy again. But if you have an established customer base, chances are you’ve worked hard to acquire them.
You should be spending some of your marketing budget to retain them. Be sure to open a dialogue with customers, solicit feedback, and communicate regularly with them.
After all, gaining repeat customers or clients is easier than acquiring new ones. This will help to build your business over the long term.
If you’re new to marketing, have experience as a marketing professional, or simply want to improve your current marketing results, be sure to learn from the mistakes of others.
To be successful, continually work towards improving your marketing effectiveness.
Avoid these seven deadly sins of marketing, and you’re on your way to delivering tangible results.
As a content and copywriter, helping businesses attract and nurture their ideal clients to grow their sales lights me up. Drop me a message today if you need help identifying your perfect client, perfecting your messaging, or promoting your services.
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