Pitfalls of business marketing: 8 ways of turning off your customer

Marketing is a vital part of growing your business but it is not always cheap so ensuring you don’t fall down the many pits that litter your path to success is vital. We’ve come up with eight marketing mistakes that you want to avoid if you don’t want to become another casualty of the global recession.

1. Stop talking about your marketing strategy: just get on with it! All the while you delay no one is finding out about your great product or service. Pick your budget, try out the best method of marketing available to you and test. Then test again to see what gives you the most productive sales leads and represents value for money.

2. Don’t plough on with your marketing plan without knowing what section of the market you want to target. Experts agree there are some companies who become so blinded by their fabulous product they don’t pay enough attention targeting the very people who might want it.

3. Don’t blind your audience with jargon or buzzwords. Just say what your product is simply. It’s those strategies that are often the most effective. Think of Ronseal’s slogan: “Does exactly what it says on the tin.”

4. Don’t think your business is too small to feature a blog on its website. If you give good, free advice about your trade that people can really use to help their businesses you can generate custom this way through your impressive knowledge. Blogging gives you an opportunity to have a direct relationship with your customers. Check out what other companies are doing on their blogs and how they are interacting with their customers. Your target audience could come up with some cracking ideas in how to make your business better.

5. If you are selling a product or service don’t start marketing strongly until you fix all the problems. Some companies mistakenly believe that strong marketing will smooth out all the flaws in their product or service. If your marketing message states that your service always delivers on time and never does because the processes that bring your service to the customer are failing, you have shot yourself in the foot.

6. Don’t fudge the issue over a “qualified sales lead”. Make sure you know exactly what this is to ensure you and your staff know and follow the right sales process. Pick out the methods of marketing that are getting those sales leads and drive them forward.

7. Don’t get seduced by expensive, attractive marketing. It may be a beautiful glossy brochure that you have produced, but how many sales leads did it give you? Have you even put a system in place that measures this?

8. Don’t send too many marketing emails. You are sure to have the recipient stabbing the delete button without fail the moment they see your firm’s name in their inbox if you have bombarded them with marketing emails. If that’s the case it doesn’t matter how good the content is, you’ve lost your customer already.