What’s the Most Common Marketing Mistakes You See? | Marketing Q&A

I am always discussing marketing mistakes here in the blog, so this time I’ve reached out to some other marketers on the mistakes they commonly see … and we’re all in agreement.

Here’s what they said – and some additional resources:

• Being impatient for results. I discussed before how to avoid unrealistic social media marketing expectations.
• Thinking of a website as an expense instead of an investment. Actually, when you have a well-developed website, it can actually function like an additional member of your team. Similarly, it’s wrong to think you don’t need a website because you have social media.
• Relying upon social media entirely. I’ve talked repeatedly about why you need to get your prospects off social media. And that social media is not marketing. 
• Not following the 80/20 rule. I’ve discussed how the 80/20 rule applies to social media.
• Not outlining goals and objectives. Knowing your goals is critical for you to be able to evaluate your marketing efforts.
• Not knowing your target audience. “People” is one of the 5 Ps of marketing, and you need to understand your audience.
• Addressing everyone, or similarly trying to solve all problems in a single post. That would make for one really, really long post. You should probably instead just post the number 42. 
• Not mapping your customer journey so that both your website and your marketing campaigns work together. Even Google search results now focus on the stage of the journey and user intent; don’t get confused, you don’t need to do it for SEO purposes … all of your SEO efforts should be customer-centric, and Google understands this.
• Highlighting what you get with the program instead of transformation. We talk specifically about how you market the benefits in an upcoming post.
• Selling instead of storytelling. We recommend that you use stories whenever possible, including on your About Us page on your website.
• Using copy templates that sell too hard or are sleazy.  And similarly, going for the controversy content without strategy or integrity.
• Not doing marketing because life happens. In most cases, the zone of genius for an entrepreneur is not marketing or social media, yet that tends to be where they end up spending a lot of time. That’s not what we recommend.

And my most important one, related to that last bullet point – continuing to handle your own marketing when that’s not your field. The best thing I’ve ever done is hand over some of that marketing to my team … and I’m a professional! Imagine how much more effective you could be at your business, and how much more time you would have to focus on your own zone of genius, if you weren’t having to do your own marketing. 

Vicky