Marketing your small business is one of the many responsibilities that demands your attention as an owner. Unfortunately, the task can prove challenging since it requires significant investments in time, money, and expertise to execute it with success.
If you want to expand your customer base and business, it is important to emphasize the marketing of your business. Nonetheless, considering the numerous aspects of marketing that require attention, it can be simple to commit errors.
We have compiled a list of X common marketing errors that small businesses make to assist you in effectively promoting your business. Additionally, we have included some tips on how to prevent them. Take a look at them below!
Top 10 Local Marketing Mistakes and How You Should Avoid Them
Running a business keeps local outlet owners and marketers occupied with a plethora of tasks. Inevitably, they struggle to find spare time and are unable to pre-plan. Consequently, they believe that any marketing effort, no matter how imperfect, is better than lacking one altogether.
Local marketers usually have limited visibility of their future needs, while distributed brand management teams typically plan well in advance for the upcoming quarter’s strategy, campaigns, and budget.
Being aware of your local outlets’ point of view enables brand managers to comprehend the significance of promptness in the marketing procedure. Local marketers are required to work with haste and efficiency because their timelines are often tight.
There are several factors that cause a disconnect between brand management teams and local marketers, with time being just one of them. When this misalignment occurs, there are seven typical mistakes that distributed marketing may encounter, ranging from minor awkwardness to expensive and potentially unlawful consequences. Keep reading to find out what these common errors are in local marketing management and how to steer clear of them.
1. Not Having a Marketing Plan
One of the marketing mistakes frequently seen in small business owners is that they tend to store every detail of their business in their own mind. Even though marketing, accounting, procedures, and tactics are all crucial facets of the business, it’s simple to overlook the necessity of documenting them in print.
Although it may seem intimidating, a survey of marketing experts discovered that having a marketing strategy increased the likelihood of achieving success by 313% compared to those without one. Consequently, it is an invaluable weapon in your marketing arsenal.
Moreover, if you have intentions of recruiting new personnel or substituting current ones, a marketing plan guarantees that they can comprehend your marketing approach, establishing them for triumph. Additionally, a marketing plan assists you in directing your forthcoming marketing tactics since it maintains an account of your past undertakings.
Although this post does not provide instructions on how to write a marketing plan, it typically involves the following elements:
- Target audience/buyers personas
- Competitor analysis
- Your USP
- Your pricing strategy
- Your marketing budget and ROI on past campaigns
- Your SMART goals
- Metrics for measuring the success of your marketing campaigns
The objective of a marketing plan is to establish specific objectives for the future, assess previous accomplishments, and communicate your marketing tactics to others. This will simplify any future recruitment procedures and establish a foundation for optimal marketing achievements.
2. Taking Design Control Into Their Own Hands
How often has your logo been improperly utilized in local advertising?
Examples of disastrous visual branding are ubiquitous. A thumbnail-sized logo that is resized by a local outlet can end up appearing blurry or pixelated. If this logo is then placed atop a document created in Microsoft Word using Comic Sans, it can appear amateurish and reminiscent of an “out of order” sign.
It is quite frequent to come across marketing errors that occur in various locations and can significantly damage the reputation of your brand. Such mistakes include misusing logos or selecting inappropriate fonts, which often happen due to the unavailability of suitable assets or difficulty in locating them. The root cause of these regrettable mishaps is disorganized digital asset management (DAM).
3. Using Last Year’s Campaign Concepts
Flint Analytics suggests that one of the major reasons behind the occurrence of missteps in local marketing campaigns is dissatisfaction, resulting in the running of campaigns from the previous year or modifying assets that differ from the national advertisement perceived by customers.
Local marketers could be dissatisfied with:
There are instances when it is unclear which campaign should be utilized with your technology. If individuals have to sift through countless folders on an FTP site just to identify the email template for “Summer 2017,” it is possible for them to become annoyed. Lacking adequate collateral management practices, distributed brands may unintentionally use non-standard campaigns.
4. Marketing Messages are Off and Sales are Dropping
Customers perceive a brand to be empathetic and valued through successful marketing. There is a possibility of customers viewing a brand negatively if the marketing seems irrelevant. When a brand’s advertisement misses its mark completely, consumers may feel insulted or irritated. Long-term relationship harm has been caused by feeling missed by a brand for 93% of customers in the US.
Whether a distributed brand misdirects its target audience on a national or local scale, the customer perceives it as equally harmful. To the consumer, ineffective marketing reflects poorly on the entire organization.
Every day, local businesses connect with their intended audience, but often lack sufficient marketing expertise to effectively engage them. In the event that your brand management team fails to deliver a campaign that caters to the practical requirements of these local businesses, inexperienced local marketers may not be able to identify the shortcomings. They will notice that the messaging is failing to resonate or is producing negative results and may take matters into their own hands by creating their own content. To address this issue, it is important to establish channels that allow local marketers to promptly inform your head office if a campaign is proving ineffective or missing the mark for their specific customer base.
5. Making Illegal Marketing Claims
Your legal counsel collaborates with your brand management team to ensure that the campaign materials given to your franchisees, dealers and outlets adhere to the advertising regulations of the FTC. Upon the release of your assets to the local teams, you’ve obtained the required feedback to validate all your assertions, guarantee the veracity of your ads and include all compulsory disclosures.
If your claim is reworded to make promises of life-altering benefits by a local outlet using your template, your brand and local outlet may face costly penalties, FTC penalties, or corrective advertising obligations.
Depending on the degree of regulation in your industry, there are various ways to avoid making a risky spread-out marketing error. For certain brands, supplying fixed content templates can prevent local affiliates from omitting mandatory legal disclosures. However, in industries with higher levels of regulation, you may need to mandate approval from your legal team through a local marketing automation (LMA) tool before allowing affiliates to use marketing materials.
6. Abusing Social Media
The right approach is necessary to effectively use social media as a means of reaching potential customers through marketing. Misusing social media by adopting hard sales tactics is a common error made by small businesses.
Small businesses should focus on using social media platforms to build brand recognition and engage with customers in a non-sales capacity instead of constantly promoting products or services in every post. By showcasing employee accomplishments and creating a space for customers to interact, businesses can establish a prominent social media presence.
To rephrase: Have you ever bought a product from a page that was overly focused on sales? It’s unlikely, and the majority of individuals likely haven’t either. Therefore, the likelihood of this tactic being successful for your company is equally slim, meaning close to zero.
It’s acceptable to incorporate a playful call to action in your captivating content. Nevertheless, prioritizing sales shouldn’t be your main objective on social media.
7. Not Focusing on Retaining Customers
Numerous businesses prioritize prompt resolution of customer grievances, as the expense of losing a customer surpasses the cost of acquiring new ones. This underscores the significance of a customer’s lifetime value, as contented customers tend to be to return and spend more money and time at your establishment.
In contrast to a loyal customer, a new customer’s lifetime value is low, and by spending time and money marketing to new customers, you reduce their lifetime value. This means you should not only focus your efforts on acquiring new customers but also ensure that existing ones are happy.
Achieving this is possible through:
- Creating content that you know your customers will enjoy
- Creating additional products or services to keep customers engaged
- Provide amazing customer service that makes them feel special
- Listen to and act on customer feedback
Your business will not only benefit from repeat visits by loyal customers but also from their tendency to promote your business to others. Word of mouth is a valuable marketing resource that enhances trust in your business and doesn’t require any investment.
8. Ignoring Analytics
Failing to track or report campaign analytics is a frequent marketing error. Disregarding the analytics will impede your ability to identify successful and unsuccessful tactics and make necessary changes for improved outcomes.
Google Analytics and Google Search Console are the most cost-effective methods of gaining insights into the visitors of your website for online advertising and website management purposes.
Despite the existence of more sophisticated analytics tools, small businesses initiating operations cannot find a better deal than the cost-free Google Analytics tool.
Utilizing methods to monitor customers in-person is an alternative approach to discover the origin of your customer base. Examples of such methods include distributing coupons and using referral codes, which not only attract new customers but also provide valuable information about them.
9. Not Budgeting
Small business owners often make the mistake of not allocating a marketing budget, as revealed by Clutch’s report of 2020. It appears that half of the small business owners did not establish an official and documented marketing budget, indicating that some perceive it as useful while others consider it unnecessary.
Having a marketing budget is essential as it enables you to have a clear picture of your company’s expenditures, making it possible to streamline your expenses by researching less expensive alternatives and avoiding duplication of marketing tools with similar features.
One convenient method to obtain a synopsis of your marketing expenditures is:
- Making a list of your expenses
- Grouping them into categories
- Researching each category for lower-cost alternatives
10. Not Having a Website
In the past, small businesses could rely on local advertising and word of mouth instead of having a website. However, with the ubiquity of smartphones and WiFi, consumers now turn to the internet first to find solutions to their problems.
Having a website enhances your business’s credibility by serving as both a promotional and communication mechanism. This platform enables you to advertise your business and keep in contact with your clients.
By having a website, you can consolidate frequently asked questions about your company, which will enable your clients to make knowledgeable choices without the need for you to answer identical queries over and over again, thereby saving you time.
In the past, setting up a website was a cumbersome or expensive task. However, presently, numerous website builders such as WordPress and Squarespace are available that are user-friendly and allow anyone to create a website without coding skills.
Wrapping Up
As shown above, there are several marketing blunders that small businesses must steer clear of. Have you committed any of these errors during your small business promotion? Additionally, are there any other blunders that one must evade? Kindly share your thoughts in the comments section.
