“The art of marketing is the art of brand building.”

—Philip Kotler

If you look outside your window or take a stroll around the neighborhood, chances are you’re going to see at least one corporate billboard or any other advertisement piece. If you’re running some errands or just lying down on the couch watching TV, it’s possible that, at some point, you’ll receive a telemarketing call. If you check your social media, it’s a fact that you’re going to see lots of merchandise. If you perform an online search, you’ll encounter a few sponsored links at the top of the page. Yes, marketing is everywhere.

Yet, some business owners still fail to recognize the importance of promoting their companies the right way. In this article, you’ll discover the five biggest marketing mistakes small businesses make and how to avoid them and strengthen your strategy (and your sales).

 1. Seeing Marketing as an Unnecessary Expense

This can be considered the biggest marketing mistake small businesses can make for one simple reason: everything else stems from there. As cliché as it may seem, the right mindset is what sets successful enterprises apart from the struggling-to-keep-the-doors-open businesses. The ideal perspective, in this case, is seeing marketing as one of the most valuable factors for your company.

Marketing is what gets the words and brand out there. If your business isn’t seen, or even worse, if it’s portrayed incorrectly, your products or services won’t sell the way you expect them to sell.

A marketing strategy has the power to generate value for small businesses over time by turning leads into customers and, hopefully, customers into evangelists, boosting sales as a result. By reshaping your perspective, you can understand that well-executed marketing campaigns drive new opportunities — even during turbulent times.

As crucial as seeing marketing as a necessary ally is, it’s equally important to comprehend which tactics and approaches to adopt. This is where a marketing plan comes in handy, and this is where many small businesses fail once again.

2. Not Having a Well-Structured Marketing Plan

Even if business owners overcome the first mistake and decide to invest in marketing, things will go wrong if they don’t know exactly what to do and what steps to take in order to accomplish the established marketing goals.

For this reason, every and each marketing strategy should be outlined in a well-structured marketing plan. In short, this document serves as a framework for every marketing decision made toward achieving business goals. In general, you must ensure that the following factors are included in your plan:

• the business’s ideal audience, or buyer persona, and exactly what they’re looking for
• the specific budget allocated to all marketing efforts, such as building an adequate website, investing in marketing collateral, creating marketing campaigns, publishing content, etc.
• the pricing strategy based on cost, value, and competitor analysis
• technologies that will improve the overall strategy, such as Client Relationship Management (CRM) and Email Marketing software
• metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for measuring the performance of all marketing campaigns, such as Cost-per-Conversion (CPC) and traffic from organic search
• an action plan and a schedule to promote the business.

Having a documented marketing strategy in place not only helps address financial costs but also improves the quality of spending in the right channels and materials. Plus, it helps new employees to be informed about the company’s marketing strategy and follow up on past marketing actions.

3. Lacking a Robust Online Presence

One of the biggest marketing mistakes small businesses make in this technological era is lacking a robust online presence. Small companies can prosper locally, of course, but they limit themselves from leveraging the digital possibilities of being discovered by numerous clients from other cities, states, or countries and earning more. Besides, a robust online presence has many paths to help a company:

1.  Competitive advantage: A digital marketing strategy helps you differentiate the products or services you offer, besides allowing you to effectively communicate to a broad online audience the Unique Value Proposition (UVP) of what you’re selling. This way, you gain an advantage over the competition, and consumers may be drawn to your company instead of buying something from other businesses.

2.  Value generation: Another way to use the power of a strong online presence is to educate potential customers through a content marketing strategy instead of only trying to sell to them. In short, powerful content generates powerful results, and when potential clients see value in what you’re providing, they become more inclined to make a purchase.

3.  Authority increase: A corporate website helps drive authority and trustworthiness among visitors and potential clients, and ignoring this fact could be devastating from a marketing point of view. Besides using a responsive and mobile-friendly website, it’s possible to use different social media channels to increase authority and drive positive results, such as Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram. Plus, through a well-structured inbound marketing strategy that uses SEO tactics, it’s easier for consumers to find your business online, which assists in generating brand awareness.

By establishing an online presence, you give potential clients a chance to get acquainted with your company and learn about the products or services you’re offering whenever they want to without the need to set foot in a physical store.

In fact, there is a study demonstrating the impact of online research before concluding in-store purchases, with 82% of smartphone users performing online searches related to the purchases they are about to make in brick-and-mortar stores.

4. Reaching Out to the Wrong Audience

Targeting the inappropriate audience can result in all of the other factors being wasted, no matter how great your business’ marketing campaigns, logo, or message are. It’s important to note that the ideal audience must be discovered through data analysis, not through a “gut feeling” or an unfounded notion about who the clients are. Targeting the masses is also not ideal because you end up spending more and making fewer sales conversions.

There are a few tactics you can use to understand who your customers are and the problems they’re trying to solve:

• conduct a thorough market research
• assess the company’s website traffic
• create social media polls to gather more data

With online polls or surveys, for instance, you can find out about your audience’s demographics (gender, age, race, income, geographic location, etc.), discover their pain points, and create a buyer persona.

By defining a buyer persona based on actual data, it’s possible to tailor your marketing efforts to match the interests and preferences of potential customers. In turn, the marketing campaigns and collateral will become more attractive and effective, and the products or services you offer will sell more.

Reaching out to the right audience has one more perk: receiving and addressing customer feedback. Many company owners fail to realize its importance, but feedback is so good to a business that it’s almost unbelievable it’s free. If the majority of feedback received is positive, keep up the good work. Now, if many customers are complaining about one or more issues, you know you have to tweak and improve what you’re selling to satisfy customers, sell more, and achieve that coveted word-of-mouth marketing.

5. Rejecting Marketing Metrics and KPIs

Last but not least, rejecting marketing metrics and KPIs can create a fog in a company’s marketing efforts. After all, if you can’t see things clearly, how will you know if a strategy is working as expected? Ignoring analytics prevents employees from understanding what is working, what doesn’t work, and what can be adjusted to bring in the desired results.

There are many valuable metrics and KPIs to track in order to understand what’s going on, such as Website Conversion Rate, Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), and Return on Investment (ROI). In short, using data is key to assessing the effectiveness of marketing activities and improving results.

Let’s see a practical example: suppose you decided to invest $3,000 in a marketing campaign to generate more leads and conversions for your company. You invested $1,000 in social media, $1,000 in guest posting, and $1,000 in PPC (Pay-Per-Click). Which strategy was the most effective and resulted in more profits?

Data will tell you that and allow you to adopt a strategic approach. For instance, if you found out that one of these strategies had little to no return, you can shift your marketing spending to focus on the other two, generating even more revenue.

Additionally, monitoring, collecting, and sharing data through marketing automation tools also helps you to:

• keep up with emerging trends and adapt to industry changes, which helps stay ahead of competitors
• make informed decisions
• allocate resources effectively
• promote effective collaboration among sales and marketing departments
• create transparency and accountability among employees
• build a data-driven and results-oriented work culture
• guarantee continuous improvement and sustained growth

Luckily, digital marketing is invaluable in terms of measuring and analyzing information. For instance, Google Analytics and Google Search Console are helpful tools to generate insights related to the corporate website’s visitors and overall website performance without spending too much.

In short, establishing and tracking metrics and KPIs is an effective way of evaluating the company’s marketing efforts because they help to analyze actual data, which allows business owners to change their strategies to match the audience interests and keep on satisfying and retaining current clients while attracting new ones.

For starters, a good idea is to take one step at a time by following the exact order of the topics above, delegating tasks to competent professionals, and improving the marketing strategy over time according to your ever-changing business goals.