What are the most common mistakes small businesses make when it comes to marketing?
One of the downsides to running your own small business is that you have to ‘wear many hats’. Often you are the sales person, bookkeeper, office administrator, tea-boy/girl and marketing manager.
It is not surprising, therefore that when making decisions about how, what and where to promote your business, mistakes can be made. And unfortunately, marketing mistakes can be costly.
So here are some of the most common marketing mistakes SME business make and a few ideas on how you can avoid them in the future.
#1 No marketing plan or strategy
This doesn’t mean a fancy report gathering dust on the shelf. It does mean thinking about who your target audiences are, what do they want from you and how can you reach them.
#2 Lack of targeting
Most businesses have multiple target audiences (customer / prospect groups). Often, however, businesses view their customers and a homogenous mass and this leads to confusing or bland messages. Make sure you know who your audiences are and decide on an audience for each activity. If you have multiple audiences, you need to be doing different things to each.
#3 Poor branding
We are surrounded by brands and use visual representation to make judgements about products and businesses from packaging design, advertisements to van livery. People will judge a small business as much as they will judge a product on the supermarket shelf by what the visual elements say to them.
People will place greater value on a company that is polished and professional looking (whatever their size) and no business can afford to have this working against them, no matter how good their actual reputation.
#4 Not trying new avenues
Going with a favourite marketing tactic and waiting for it to fail before trying something else. This linear approach is often a ‘path of least resistance’ because there is a lack of appetite to proactively look at what needs to be done, but is very dangerous as it can leave a serious hole when the tactic fails and leave the business open to making knee jerk reactions, rather than measured judgements. This way of working tends to be costly in the long run.
#5 Doing what you have always done – even when it is failing
One of the usual outcomes of point 4 is that people can continue spending on marketing that isn’t working because they don’t know what else to do. If it isn’t working, look at why that could be. Could you change your offer or message?
If it still isn’t working, don’t throw good money after bad and hopefully if you are trying new things you can invest your marketing spend in areas that are still working (or test new options).
#6 Not understanding how much you can afford to spend to win a new customer
I get asked questions such as ‘What response rate should I expect from a leaflet?’ The answer is whatever you need to make it cost effective!
If you are marketing a high value but low need service such as care homes, for example, you won’t get high response rates from a leaflet drop, but you don’t need one as the income from a new resident will be very high so you don’t need a high response rate to make the activity profitable.
If you are selling cut price MOT’s, you will need a higher response rate as there is far less profit BUT as there is a repeat purchase element, you will also need to factor that in.
But if your leaflet is promoting a 2 day retail sale, then it will need to generate enough people through the door just to that event.
As a business you should have an understanding of how much a customer is worth to you both on the initial sale and any repeat sales you are likely to get from them.
#7 Concentrating too much on getting new customers
This sounds a bit nonsense as new customers are essential for business, but I find that many small businesses put all their marketing efforts and spend into attracting new customers and no marketing effort into keeping and developing the ones they have won.
Just delivering your product or service is not enough to keep a customer. Without promoting what else you can do, you will certainly not get the most money out of them through cross and up selling.
For more ideas on how to encourage more sales from existing customers read this blog
Allocate a portion of your marketing budget and efforts onto activities to keep in touch, inform and also sell to your existing customers.
#8 Not understanding that employees are delivering on your marketing ‘promise’
Poor training or communication of what you are doing undermines anything you may say in your marketing. So, going back to the leaflet example earlier, if you haven’t briefed your staff and told then what to do when someone calls or drops in as a result of the leaflet you are doing more than waste an opportunity, you are undermining everything that your marketing is saying about you.
Make sure all your staff know what you are doing, why you are doing it and what you expect of them.
#9 Not using the power of your own customers
Don’t forget to ask your customers for testimonials and even referrals. Directory sites such as FreeIndex allow customers to post reviews increases rankings in the site. Google Places also allows you to get customers to rate you which translates into star ratings plus includes testimonials. You can ask for testimonials from the people you are connected to on LinkedIn.
You can also use online survey tools such as Survey Monkey to send out online customer satisfaction surveys with free text questions for them to give you sound-bite testimonials. And, once you have these, don’t be afraid to use on your website, marketing literature, advertising and even proposal documents. Being in business is not about being modest!