8 Most Common Marketing Mistakes And Tips to Avoid Them

Learning from other marketers’ mistakes is always better than making your own. And that is the most important thing about marketing as it is only as effective as its execution. Properly considering the experience and message being sent to future and existing customers can make or break campaigns. On that note, here are the eight most common marketing mistakes and how to avoid them so you can keep your sales and marketing efforts on track.

1. Making Assumptions

Assuming that you know your customers, their preferences, their loyalty to you, and the competitive environment in which you operate is one of the most costly mistakes you can make. In most cases, you’re likely wrong. Regularly survey your customers to see what they like and don’t like about your brand, your products, and your service. Analyze results to identify trends and things you can do to maintain and increase satisfaction. Don’t assume everything!

2. Ignoring Customer’s Feedbacks

With all the social media channels available, unhappy customers can share a bad brand experience with literally thousands of people in a matter of minutes. In addition to their Facebook, Twitter, and other social accounts, they can quickly post negative reviews about you so make sure to be responsive and cater their feedback and reply in a timely manner. 

3. Not Investing in Ads

It’s a common hurdle for small businesses: they have the budget, but they don’t invest it in marketing. In fact, recent studies show that at every life stage, business owners wish they invested more in marketing. So, don’t let a lack of budget prevent you from securing high ROI opportunities. If you want more sales conversion then you got to invest in proper marketing campaigns and ads.

4. Competing On Price

Discounts and price cuts have their place but only temporarily, such as when you’re trying to stimulate the first‐time trial and build a base of customers for future email or social media campaigns. Keeping prices low for an extended period of time or offering low prices frequently just puts customers on notice to hold off and never pay full price. You quickly position your brand as the budget option, which limits your appeal and creates fickle customers.

5. Not Tracking Performance

Modern technology has made it easier than ever to keep track of your customers' behavior and use it to your advantage. Unfortunately, many businesses use this data to craft marketing campaigns they believe will perform well, but then they fail to track the performance to identify areas for improvement. With all this technology, you can track every aspect of your marketing campaigns, so there's no reason you shouldn't know where you have succeeded and where you can improve. 

6. Poor Background Research

Before launching a marketing campaign, you need to understand your customers. Regardless of your campaign’s purpose, be it building brand awareness, increasing engagement, generating leads, etc. -- it must consider the audience to be compelling. Carve out a portion of your marketing spend for research. Once you've found a successful campaign, you can scale it to reap the benefits.

7. Offering What you Can’t Deliver

Simple, don’t make promises that you can’t keep. When you make promises you’re not sure you can deliver on, you put yourself in the category of bad salespeople who can’t be trusted. In addition, if you try to roll out a product that doesn’t work yet or before you’ve worked out all the details for execution, service, and troubleshooting, you set customers up to have a bad experience with you. 

8. Forgetting to Edit

Make sure to cross check all your letters, email, website, print ad, sign, or billboards that have a typo in it, cuz people remember that goof and forget the rest. Not only can sloppy mistakes make a bad first impression among prospects, but they can also make people question the amount of attention you pay to detail when producing your products. Remember, your brand is only as good as your reputation.