6 reasons why small businesses get marketing wrong

The heart of your business success lies in its marketing. Without marketing, your business may offer the best products or services in your industry, but none of your potential customers would know about it. However, just because businesses have a marketing plan in place, it doesn’t mean they have a successful marketing plan in place. Wondering why your marketing isn’t working, then read on to find out about some of the most common marketing mistakes businesses make.

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You haven’t refined your marketing strategy

As with everything else in life, marketing requires a plan. Without marketing, sales may crash, and companies may have to close – every business knows they should be doing marketing but ‘how’ is another question. Marketing is not just sending a few e-mails and uploading a social media post every week. For successful marketing you need a strategy and once you have a plan, it must be implemented. A marketing strategy includes audience, revenue, profit and brand and you should change your strategy when you realise that what you’re doing is not as effective as it could be. In order to see what marketing is working over both the short and the longer term you should have a centralised eco system in place to track this for you.

You haven’t adjusted your marketing methods for years

As the world has evolved over the years, marketing has too. Tried and tested activities that were popular years ago, just don’t work anymore. Advertising rarely gets enough response in order to justify the costs and you might even find that the website you spent a lot of money and time on, just isn’t creating the appropriate leads and clicks. People no longer want to receive traditional marketing methods like newspaper adverts and flyers as the public are now, a lot smarter than that and live in a world where they filter out things they do not want to read. Nowadays, effective marketing comes down to creating high quality and very personalised content, which is then shared across the web. To learn more about how to create personalised content click here.

You’re trying to do too much

Small businesses often don’t have the time, budget or resources to successfully install an in-house marketing strategy. You can’t do it all so consider using specialist external companies to help you create content and design your marketing material etc. Marketing success doesn’t happen overnight, and you should see it as a journey rather than a destination.

You don’t know your audience

If you don’t know who you are trying to interact with then how do you know what to put out there? Every social media channel has a different audience, every business has a different target audience and before you decide strategy, buy advertising or create content, you need to know what to say and how. The goal of marketing is to reach your audience, so you need to know who they are through the data you collect.

You aren’t tracking your success

You’ve just got your head around marketing and now you need to understand tracking – we get it, it’s confusing! However, think about it, what is the point of putting in all the hard work if you don’t know how it’s being received or what people are looking at. With a tracking system in place, you can see who is clicking on links and what they are looking at on your website eventually nurturing these leads into sales.