The goal of every business is to grow. I have yet to meet a business owner who believes that his/hers business has enough reach and that they can relax and let things run their course. If a business stagnates, it is at a risk of losing the leads it already has and failing to generate new revenue. This is a problem that is usually solved through marketing efforts that are carefully planned and well executed. Unfortunately, not every marketing campaign can boast with these qualities.
Sloppy marketing can get a well standing business into a lot of trouble. There are tons of situations where businesses waste their marketing budget by organizing poorly planned and sloppily executed promotional events and campaigns. There are some things that you need to keep in mind when organizing a marketing campaign so as to avoid throwing your marketing budget into the wind, especially if you are new to this. Let’s take a look at some of the more common errors in judgment businesses make, shall we?
Mistake No. 1:
If you make a good product, you don’t need marketing
The biggest mistake when it comes to marketing is to think that you don’t need it. Word of mouth only goes so far, and you really need to make a national sensation out of your product or service to be able to rely on this kind of thinking. Even then, you are still wasting a big chunk of your marketing potential by avoiding active marketing efforts. People need you to tell them about your business so they can check you out. Otherwise, you are a no name brand that just sits on the store shelf, unknown and untrustworthy.
Mistake No. 2:
Advertise broadly and you will get more leads
You can advertise your soul out, but if you are targeting people who are just not interested into what you have to offer, you are going to end up wasting your money and your nerves. You need to know your target audience and market to them specifically. This allows you to get a better chance of advertising to a person that will actually convert, in other words, buy the product or service. To make things painfully obvious, you can market glasses to people with 20/20 vision all day long and they still won’t buy them, even if they can see them perfectly!
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Mistake No. 3:
If they managed to sell their product so shall we
This one is very common. Identifying with your competition and believing that you can sell your product just because they manage to sell theirs is a common marketing illness. Unique value is at the core of every marketing campaign, and if the potential customers can’t recognize any unique value compared to a well established competitor, they will indisputably go to your competitor. You need to give them a reason to check you out, otherwise, you end up looking like a copycat.
Mistake No. 4:
We don’t need a planned budget for marketing
This kind of approach is bad news. Ending up with less money than you need is bad but spending more than you should might be even worse. The general rule of thumb is that you set aside somewhere between 1,5% to 3,0% of your revenue for marketing purposes. Anything more and you might end up in trouble. Even if you think you’ve found an advertising approach that fits your needs perfectly, don’t go on investing if you are not ready for it and put yourself in an awkward financial state.
Good advertising takes guts, but it also takes foresight and extensive preparations. You don’t just run into an advertising campaign for no good reason. Don’t worry, even some of the biggest companies in the world make marketing mistakes and miss their mark. Just be careful that bad marketing doesn’t become something you’ve grown accustomed to.
Some companies that use poor marketing refer to it as their “style” of marketing in order to justify their unorthodox approach, but bad marketing has nothing to do with style. It has more to do with effectiveness than anything else really. I hope this gets you on the right truck. Stay happy and market well!
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