If you are a new entrepreneur or business owner, and you want to find out whether your marketing campaigns are doing well, take a moment to make sure you aren’t making these damaging mistakes that could negatively hurt your business:
1. Ignoring the brand
To market your business, you have to create a brand. Your brand serves as a foundation of identity for new and old customers alike. Your brand should underline and inform all messaging you put out. This is from the content of your website to the images on your social media pages banners.
When people see your brand, or notice your logo, they will form an opinion of certain traits of your business. Without that connection, your material is floating in space with no association. The more connections you build, the more familiar your customers will become with your brand. This will also highly inform their decision to buy from you.
2. Having Assumptions about your Audience
Some marketers understand that they must create messaging for specific audience segments but still don’t do it effectively. This is because they’ve made broad assumptions about their target audience, rather than relying on data and research to support their ideas.
As a general rule, you should question every assumption you make. Are you making your marketing decisions because of the way you think things work, or because of the way things actually work? Data is your only path to the truth.
3. Fear of Experimenting
Marketing is not Russian roulette, no matter how much we sometimes want it to be. It is a game of setting and resetting expectations, getting as close as possible to creating a perfect strategy, without ever quite getting there. The only way to get better at marketing is by experimenting. This is by trying new things and being bold with your strategies, to see which ones work and which ones fail.
Adopt the strategies that work along the way and drop the ones that do not work to ensure your business is in a much more effective state. Never rule out a strategy unless you have data proving it is ineffective.
4. Marketing to Everyone
Too many entrepreneurs make the simple mistake of marketing their business to everyone. After all, “everybody” is the largest possible audience, so it offers the largest possible return, right? Wrong. Even if you could somehow use one selection of platforms to get a specific message to everyone in the world, that message would be too generic for the entire population to value or remember.
Instead, to stand out, you have to be unique, and if you want to make an impression, you have to be relevant. Being both unique and relevant requires you to create specifically crafted messaging for one segment of the population at a time.
