Marketing Mistakes That Could Ruin Your Profits

Last updated: Digital Marketing 4 min read
Your marketing strategy impacts your reputation, your customers, and most importantly, your profits. A well-planned strategy can turn this year into your best year so far, but it’s difficult to recover from some mistakes. Businesses must make the switch from personalizing messages to reaching out to specific individuals. Retention marketing must be a key focus or loyal customers will drift to competitors. In order to keep your business thriving, it is important to know what to avoid as you are marketing.

Failure to Create Compelling Content

Content is key when it comes to new business, customer retention, and even SEO. Longer, better quality content has been shown to hold a lot of SEO power for a website. However, it’s not enough to simply create large and frequent amounts of content – you must also be sure that it is worthwhile content. You need to keep in mind what your target audience would find compelling and focus on that. Boring content will make a product or company come off as far less appealing to consumers. Content that engages your audience and that provides a benefit to your target market is the kind of content that builds goodwill and the perception of expertise. Failing to create content that entertains, educates, and engages your audience will doom your content marketing efforts regardless of how much time and money you put into it. Content for content’s sake (or, heaven forbid, stolen content) will not do you any favors.

Choosing the Wrong Method of Marketing

There are many options for your business to market itself, ranging from email to flyers to social media. Certain platforms are more effective than others in reaching your target audience. As society becomes increasingly focused on technology, online content is becoming the best way to reach people, but it’s still important to look at your target demographic to know how to reach them. Is your ideal customer more likely to engage with you through email or a direct mail coupon? Understanding where you will be able to access your target audience is key. Find social media groups, forums, channels, and other online platforms where your consumers will be. If you want to do more traditional forms of marketing, determine what restaurants, conferences, and other locations your audience would frequent and advertise there. Planning and strategizing which channels you’ll target and how you’ll approach your marketing content is crucial to success. Without a well thought out plan, you could completely miss your target audience and waste both time, money, and resources. Many businesses pour substantial amounts of money into marketing, assuming a plan is secondary to ample funding. While spending is a helpful and important aspect, money is not effective without the proper plan. Map out objectives, product orientation, brand awareness, promotional channels, and your budget before beginning any marketing campaign. It is imperative that you are choosing the right method of marketing so you are getting the most value out of your content marketing strategy.

Failure to Convert Leads into Customers

If you want to market successfully in 2018, you need to remember that you are not finished once you send out your advertisements or content. You need to pursue the leads that you get from potential customers giving you any contact information. Once you have a group of people who are interested, you need to work to convert them into customers. One of the most important factors in converting a lead into a customer is the response time – how quickly are you contacting leads once they’ve sent you their information? A few minutes? A few hours? Days? The faster that you contact the lead, the more likely they’ll give you their business. Is there a system in places to contact new or old customers that are leaving you voicemails? Is someone checking all of the contact forms that come through? Being diligent, examining your conversion process, and being quick to respond can be the difference between being successful and being out of business.

Ignoring Online Reputation Management and Reviews

The online reputation of your brand is incredibly important to your ability to successfully market your business. Checking online reviews is one of the first things many people do when they are interested in a business. Often, it’s the deciding factor on whether someone chooses your business over someone else’s. It is vital that you maintain a positive online reputation that will direct consumers towards your company, not away from it. Ignoring your business’ online reputation is something that happens far too often. Negative reviews about your business online can be detrimental to your overall brand, but it’s important that you use this information to improve your business. While many negative reviews may not provide any insight into how to improve your business, there are sure to be some reviews that can help you find specific areas to improve upon. Responding to online feedback is one of the most important parts of managing your online reputation. You want to empathize with your customer while attempting to resolve the situation, but you do not want to respond in any way that will make your business look unprofessional. Properly handling and responding to an online review, even if it’s negative, will help showcase your business as knowledgeable, professional, and compassionate.

Put Time and Thought into Your Marketing

No matter what your marketing strategy is, you must give it extensive thought and focus. A poor marketing plan can be extremely detrimental to a business and will put you at a disadvantage with your competition. A fantastic marketing plan can be the thing that leads your company to success. Avoiding these four mistakes could help your business continue to grow and thrive.

Contact TheeDigital Today

Even for a seasoned company, it can still be easy to fall into a marketing rut that isn’t actually growing your business. Contact the marketing strategy professionals at TheeDigital today to help you reexamine your marketing strategy and find out where you could be making more money. Call us at 919-341-8901 or schedule your free consultation.  

Tags: Digital Marketing

Richard Horvath

Owner / President

Richard Horvath is the founder of TheeDigital, a Raleigh based award-winning web design and digital marketing agency. He is proud of his team and the results that they provide to their clients.

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