Most Common Marketing Blunders to Avoid

Marketing is important for your business and startups, to showcase yourself and your products, and to appeal to your potential customers. Good marketing strategies are a must have when you venture out with your products. While marketing can accelerate the growth of your business, and turn in huge revenues if done right, mistakes in marketing can cost you the revenue, but also your image. Here are a few marketing blunders to avoid:

1) Shying away from self-promotion: The biggest marketing mistake you can do is not market enough! There is no place to be shy when it comes to spreading word about you and your product or service, as it’s crucial that you are known for your business to be successful! There might be many reasons behind being stingy about promotion. It might be that you shy away from talking about yourself, you might think that your product or service is not worthy of too much attention, or you might also think that your product or service is good enough to get recognition on its own. However, these reasoning do not work most of the time, as people trust you and your service after only knowing about it!

2) Lack of research: Researching and testing are important components of marketing which if overlooked could cost extra budget after launching marketing. It is important to research what kind of marketing strategies would work, and how customers would potentially react. Therefore testing a few marketing campaigns and promotional ideas are great to identify what works and what does not. Based on this testing you can budget to more effective marketing strategies. However, it is also important to draw a clear line on how much you base yourself solely on data and researches that have been done, and how much you trust on your product and services!

3) Lack of clarity in positioning yourself: One of the biggest flaws of marketing is trying to reach out to as much population as you can without realizing who your target audiences are. Identifying your focus area and your target customers helps you to build your own profile and niche in the market. Being overly generic, and reaching out to no one in particular, only helps in overuse of your marketing resources without equal turn back. Identifying target customers also allows you to choose specific arenas for marketing, improving your efficiency, and also building a loyal customer base.

4) Failing to capture customers: Customers are the most important aspect of your business, and through marketing you are aiming to get to them. However, this might fall flat if your marketing strategies does not match with the need of your potential customers. This also builds onto the previous point, whereby when you know your target audience and customers, you can cater your marketing to the likes and needs of your customers, instead of the campaign falling on uninterested ears. Also, while it is important to target new customers, you should not lose focus on retaining the customers that you already earned. So advertise effectively to your old customers too!

Marketing has a lot of elements to it, and while there are many opportunities to promote your business, there are also pitfalls you might find yourself in. Therefore, while marketing your business, keep in mind to make use of avenues that you have for marketing, while being efficient with your campaigns. Blunders are sometimes inevitable, and in marketing they can be a lesson for what works, and what doesn’t, for you!