The early days of any business venture are fraught with countless learning curves that vary from gradual, steady inclines to treacherous mountain climbs, some of which will take years to summit. Your business’s marketing lies somewhere in the middle – it’ll be a long, but gradual incline. Marketing is a fundamental element of any business. Still, smaller outfits in particular can find it challenging, whether it’s due to a lack of organisational knowledge or budget and time constraints, leading to marketing mistakes.
In this article, we’re going to take a deep dive into two of the most common marketing mistakes that we see small businesses everywhere making. We hope we can also provide some constructive solutions that won’t pull you away from other vital aspects of your company for too long or eat up too much of your budget. Large budgets or huge corporate teams don’t gatekeep successful marketing; it just requires clear goals and determination.
1. No Clear Marketing Strategy
Our first mistake is a big one, and trickles through to every aspect of your business’s marketing efforts. Perfecting a marketing strategy on the first attempt would be an extraordinary, if unlikely, feat for most new businesses. After all, if you’ve never done something before, you’re more prone to making mistakes and omitting key details. Plus, for many, the conception of a marketing strategy usually occurs while getting the business operational is the top priority, so it can end up being an afterthought.
So what goes wrong? For many, it’s simple: there isn’t much of a strategy to begin with. If you’re throwing yourself into marketing activities sporadically without a plan, you’re far more likely to be putting valuable time and resources to waste. Even if you have the bones of a strategy in place, with some preferred channels and an idea of who your target audience is, you’re probably lacking the consistency required to hit the milestones that you’re really striving for.
Your strategy doesn’t need to be complicated and it’s even easier to avoid marketing mistakes when you have expert guidance. Follow these steps to construct a marketing roadmap that’ll put your business on the path to success.
Set Your Budget & Goals
What do you want your marketing to achieve? Perhaps you’re aiming to increase website conversions or improve brand awareness, for instance. Ensure your goals are SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. For example, ‘increase inbound traffic to the website’s landing page by 20% by March”. Give yourself a large enough budget to feasibly achieve your goals.
Target Audience
Familiarising yourself with your audience is essential to any marketing strategy. The more you know them, the more effective your communication will be, as you can tailor your approaches to their specific interests and needs. Furthermore, identifying your target audience will influence the marketing channels that you choose. Suppose your business model focuses on B2B (business-to-business) sales. In that case, you might opt for a platform like LinkedIn, where business owners who need your product or service are likely to be browsing.
What is Your USP?
Define how your business differs from the competition and why a customer should choose you. This unique selling point (USP) should be communicated in all your marketing materials.
Promotion
Which methods are you going to use to reach your target audience? This will depend on your budget, but there is no shortage of options, for example, email marketing, SEO (search engine optimisation), SEM (search engine marketing), or pushing content on your own social media accounts.
Choose your marketing channels based on where your target audience spends most of their time. Focus your efforts on one or two channels for starters, before branching out further; you don’t want to spread yourself too thin.
Measure & Adapt
Use metrics like sales, conversion rates, engagement rates and website traffic to track the performance of your marketing efforts and analyse the results to make necessary tweaks to your strategy. Don’t forget to adapt your approach as paradigms shift in the future; new social media platforms, innovative machine learning, and new hardware devices will emerge and change how your customers access your product or service.
Failing to Establish an Online Presence
An online presence isn’t necessarily essential for every business. There are plenty of local tradesmen and women who need only rely on word of mouth and repeat business to make healthy profits and live comfortably. But for so many small businesses, their resistance to digital marketing is capping their profits and is one of the biggest marketing mistakes.
There are a shocking number of small businesses that don’t even bother with a website, while others do the bare minimum to maintain clunky, poorly optimised sites, which probably repel more customers than they attract. These companies are actively depriving themselves of business and don’t know what they’re missing. Nearly all UK customers use the internet to find businesses – a recent report, 85% of customers visit a local business within a week of finding it online, while 17% even visit the next day. So why not take advantage of all of these potential customers?
To build a good website, you don’t need to be well-versed in software engineering or even know the basics of coding. If you have the time, you can utilise a content management system, like Squarespace or Wix, which simplifies the development process and gives you the tools and flexibility you need to help you realise your vision.
On the other hand, you can outsource your web development to either a freelance developer or a design agency. Both options offer quick turnaround times and allow you to optimise your online presence for search engines – this will improve your odds of appearing higher up in search engine results pages and result in more exposure and higher traffic.
Small Businesses with Stand-Out Websites
The Cartford Inn
A family-owned restaurant in the north of England, which grew from being a local secret to attracting the attention of international tourists and celebrities like George Clooney.
Skin by Gabby
A Californian aesthetician on a finely-tuned and well-optimised site, which has boosted her brand from being hyper-local to reach international shores.
BGN
A leading branding agency Manchester businesses trust, their colourful, attention-grabbing website has clearly contributed to their success and drives significant traffic their way, while also keeping user experience at the forefront.
Small business owners have a lot on their plates: financial pressure, logistical nightmares, and staffing issues already pile on more than enough pressure, so, understandably, marketing can slip down the to-do list. By developing a marketing strategy that maximises resources and building an online presence that attracts people who are already searching for what you offer, you’ll remove the risk of making any marketing mistakes and put yourself in a better position to accomplish, or even exceed, your business goals.
Written by Damian Woods