Small Business Marketing Mistakes: A Quick Read

Common Small Business Marketing Mistakes that are easy to avoid

Marketing is a job of it’s own for a reason.  Here are a few mistakes to skip:

Marketing your small business can seem daunting, and for good reason.  It is a full-time job of it’s own.  It can be tough to know how to get your message out to your target market, regardless of your level of expertise.  So, to get you started, here are a few simple mistakes to avoid.

Online Marketing: You don’t know what you’re doing, but do it anyway.

No, no, no.  We’re proud that you’re willing to give the unknown a shot.  But online marketing is a very important key tool for small businesses of today.  Going online and filling your social media profiles with self-bragging and links, hoping you’ll get clicks and likes, will not help you.  In fact, it can hurt you.  If you don’t know what you’re doing, you need to learn.  Or hire someone who does know what they are doing.  It will be worth either your time or money to make sure you’re doing it right, BEFORE your efforts work against you.

Marketing Shmarketing.

Business is going well and so who needs marketing?  I didn’t do it before and things are going great, so why fix what isn’t broken?  Well, Marketing isn’t for the “Now” it’s for the “Future”.  Marketing is an investment into tomorrow, next month,  next year, and beyond.  Marketing now is for the purpose of getting and keeping your brand out there and in front of your customers.  Marketing is effort made today to keep your brand in the spotlight permanently.  You may have great business today, but if it suddenly slows down and now you need sales TODAY, well, it’s too late to get marketing to work to get you sales TODAY.  Market today for the sales tomorrow.  Make sense?

Social Media Frenzy!

You’re not sure what all the hype is about, but you know it’s trending so you gotta be on it!  If there is any new social media site, you have decided you must be on it.  The problem is… your target market isn’t.  So now with every status update and post, you’re simply wasting your time.  And time is money!  Social media is important.  But on this topic, it’s important to go with quality, not quantity.  Choose the social media sites that are relevant to benefit your industry.  Your metal roofing company isn’t likely to be found as a tip on Pinterest, but could benefit from an ad on Facebook.  Your posts on LinkedIn aren’t going to help your local bakery, but are certain to bring in business from Four Square or even Twitter.

What are your measurements?

What good are your marketing efforts if you aren’t aware of what is working and what isn’t?  There aren’t really any excuses here: Social media sites and even your website designer will have analytics built in to get reports from.  You can easily see what’s been working and what failed miserably.  And all of the positive and negative results will help you build even better campaigns in the future.

All those eggs and you only bought one basket.

Facebook is your favorite!  So all of your time and ad money has gone strictly to this format.  You’ve decided to ignore your other platforms of press releases, additional social media sites, search engine advertisements or even old school printed mailers.  Oh boy…  Hey, we’re glad that your Facebook ads generated a lead or three.  But what happens when you’ve already reached a majority of your target audience?  It’s important to diversify your marketing efforts rather than focus and flood one avenue with your brand.  That way, if one avenue happens to dissolve (how’s MySpace working these days?), you’re already working other options.

It’s important to have a marketing strategy, even if it’s a simple one.  If you’re unsure of how it works, either invest the money into someone who does or invest the time into learning to do it for yourself.  An uneducated marketer is a dangerous one.  But just a few efforts in the right direction, combined with avoiding these simple mistakes, can make for some pretty great results.