There is plenty of advice out there when it comes to getting your marketing strategy up to speed, but this post by Steve Lawrence from The SEO Consultant London will help you to focus on some common mistakes that people make to help you avoid them from the start. Avoiding these common mistakes in your business marketing could save you time and money – not to mention a few headaches along the way.
Mistake 1: Trying to control everything
You know your business back to front and inside out. So, it’s not surprising that you want to take the reins of your marketing campaign and lead it all the way through from your first written ad or piece of copy to the fruit of the coveted conversion. But if you do not look for support, advice, and guidance along the way, you will likely blind yourself to a few essential ingredients and leave your campaign wanting and yourself – frustrated and unsure of what went wrong. Even if you can envision your entire marketing campaign: from strategy to creativity to audience and end results, if you try to load everything in all at once, without the proper support and additional professional marketing expertise, you will burn out, and the success of your business marketing will be at risk.
Mistake 2: Lack of consistency
This one can come together with mistake one, as you will inevitably drop the ball on being consistent if you are juggling too many balls. But consistency is probably more important than you have considered. Essentially, marketing is the lifeblood of your business: a campaign doesn’t start and end in a linear way; rather, it has branches and remains fluid. With fluidity, you must be present and consistent with both your message and your availability to engage, inform and help your customers. Consistency is the customer-service side of your marketing. Even the small mistake of not offering customers a satisfactory way to contact questions can be detrimental to the success of your marketing.
Customers want to see that you are actively interested in hearing from them and getting their feedback and that you are offering insightful and helpful information rather than just calls to action to drive sales. So be present: write blogs, post a few photos or make a photo video, appear in a video, update your website – whatever it is – be the consistent and present voice behind the business. The time and dedication it takes to be consistent in this way is often the reason good strategies call for expert help to take care of the technical side: SEO, managing and analysing ad data, and so on.
Mistake 3: Underestimating the importance of brand identity
Brand and brand identity are quite different things. Successful marketing relies on brand identity; it’s not enough to simply have a great logo and a slick website. Brand identity is the story of your business and the passion that has brought you to this point. It’s personal – and that’s what your customers will relate to. Stats, facts, and figures are impressive, but a business that is brave enough to show its personality and charisma is even more so. Your brand identity can come to life in several ways, successful copy that optimises your content, bespoke imagery such as team photographs and/or promotional video, and testimonial content – to name a few. Neglecting it could be your marketing downfall.
Mistake 4: Putting all your eggs in one basket
With this mistake, the pitfalls can be a little more subtle. By ‘putting all your eggs in one basket’, we don’t mean investing all your trust into one marketing company or expert to help you. In fact, this can often be a good thing. Using more than one marketing expert might damage your campaign. What we’re talking about is strategy – spread your processes across more than one platform rather than relying on one solid and unmoving route. For example, if you are running PPC ads, creating more than one to three is a respectable number to trial. Use different copy, different imagery/video, but stay on brand and on message with each.
You can start with a small ‘tester’ budget to evaluate the waters and to see which ad is returning the most action. Once you, or your marketing expert, have read the data from each ad, you will have a better idea of which to run with. Then you can use the successful elements of this ad to create and assess out another, and so on.
Overall, know that you can still be in control of a great marketing strategy while enlisting the help of those who can take some of the burden and help it take flight. Stay active, use blogs that reflect your brand identity, post on social media, and be available for your potential customers.
