No one is perfect. And no business is perfect. People and businesses sometimes make mistakes. And that includes me. In my many years in marketing, I've seen a lot of inspired marketing strategy, but I've also seen a great deal of programs that just don't work. So, what are the most common mistakes? Read on for the top three.
1 - Building awareness, but getting noticed by the wrong audience.
A fundamental strategy of marketing is promotion. Get out there and get noticed. From a marketing funnel perspective, this is the Awareness stage. It's crucial to focus on awareness. No one is going to buy from you or hire you if they aren't aware of you. The mistake happens when businesses spend a lot of effort in marketing, but not enough time identifying the target audience. For example, imagine you're selling sturdy trucks and you want to market them to the greatest number of people possible. The greatest number of people are concentrated in cities. Your marketing ends up hitting a lot of city dwellers. and people in the city don't tend to buy trucks. As a result, your efforts are wasted. If you had targeted suburban or rural communities, the same content would have gone to a smaller number of people, but would resonate much better. This mistake happens more often than you might think. Targeting the right audience is absolutely crucial in ensuring the time, money and effort you spend on marketing is not wasted. Do the work upfront to identify your audience. Then specifically target them using the right channels and the right content.
2 - Fixing the wrong problem (or fixing something that's not a problem)
Let's go back to the marketing funnel. The funnel consists of Awareness, Consideration and Conversion, in its most basic form. Some marketers address a marketing challenge by addressing the wrong issue. For instance, if you're getting a good number of hits on your website, but no one is buying from you, that's a Consideration problem. The content on your website may not be clear. Maybe your value proposition and positioning are not resonating. To fix this, the solution is not Awareness (getting more website hits), it is elsewhere - website content or value proposition design, which is further down the funnel. If you're not getting the marketing results you want, analyze your touch points. Where in the process is the actual issue? Are your customers aware of you, but not buying? Are you making a lot of proposals, but not closing deals? Only by addressing the real issue can you fix it and move on.
3 - Generating content that just doesn't work
Content is a crucial part of today's marketing strategy. Content can include website copy, social media posts, white papers, infographics, articles and podcasts. Many marketers spend a lot of their time on generating content. There are two common content mistakes that are made.
The first content mistake is salesy copy. This means the content sounds too much like a sales pitch. This is a problem because most consumers tune out sales pitches. The content you produce should be relevant, timely and helpful. Content that always makes a sales pitch often just doesn't get through to the audience.
The second content mistake is not being authentic to your brand. In an effort to react to the most recent trends, many brands react with content that may not be authentic or brand appropriate. Responding to trends shows that you're timely and in-touch with what's going on. But always remember to be authentic and support causes you truly believe in. If you don't, the inauthenticity comes through, and it may do more harm than good.
Please let me know if you need help with your marketing strategy. One benefit of having done marketing for such a long time is that I have an advanced degree in making mistakes. And, as a result, am pretty good at knowing how to avoid them!