Common Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

Image courtesy of likeable.com.
Image courtesy of likeable.com.

We are all human, right? We all make mistakes. However, we like to hope that our mistakes are not put on public display. This is not the case for marketers because marketing mistakes can be costly for brands. Here are some common mistakes made every day that can be avoided.

Marketing without a Unique Selling Proposition
What makes your brand unique? Your unique selling proposition (USP) is a statement that separates your brand from competing brands. Do your customers know what your USP is? Many marketers make the mistake of marketing without highlighting their brand’s USP.

Apple did a wonderful job presenting their USP. Their success has been, in part, due to their amazing marketing, along with some key innovations. When they began to make a comeback in the early millennium, they positioned themselves as the user-friendly, creative, and innovative technology brand. In reality, there are other companies with similar technologies. What Apple did well was to show customers what made them unique, and to operate by those ideas. The tech company intentionally designed their products to look clean, simple, and futuristic, which furthered their branding effort and allowed for their designs to become another USP. The lesson is to make sure that your marketing efforts help customers understand your USP.

Website Speed Matters
This is a SEO (Search Engine Optimization) lesson for marketers. Loading times can make or break your website. Roughly half of all visitors will leave a website if it takes multiple seconds to load. Think about it, users are constantly on the move, browsing to pass the time. No one wants to wait at a blank page until the page slowly loads. Users have also become increasingly spoiled with high speed internet now that it is readily available. A slow webpage can damage your SEO ranking, which can cause your website to lose its front page position. Not many people are “deep Googlers,” meaning users who check out more than just the first page on Google. If they can’t get what they want on the first page, they will likely try different keywords instead of checking the next few pages. Giant banners can cause a webpage’s loading time to rise significantly. Excessive coding can also cause problems. Find creative ways to reduce the loading time of your page.

Success is often a Numbers Game
There has been a longstanding debate about how to truly measure the success of a marketing campaign. Some people argue that marketing success is based off of more than just numbers, while others argue that numbers are the key factor in success measurement. However, if you are dealing with clients, they will likely want to see numbers. After all, they don’t know how to measure a marketer’s skill level any other way. But numbers do more than help marketers gain authority.

How do you know if your marketing campaign is working? We like to think that a simple look into our brand’s target demographics and catering a message to them is enough to achieve more growth. But is it really? The best way to validate your marketing success is through numbers. Social Media websites make this process much easier. We can tell how successful Social Media marketing attempts are by looking at the insights and analytics of posts, campaigns, or brand pages. Numbers can also help marketers set benchmarks. If you know how successful your marketing efforts have been in the past, and how the brand is currently doing, you can set more realistic benchmarks for future campaigns.

Forgetting to Market to Current or Past Customers
Companies like to reach as many potential consumers as possible. Many companies have a tendency to forget about their current or past customers because they are focused solely on new customers. Most companies sell products or services that can be purchased multiple times by the same customer. Why lose out on tons of repeated business? The Pareto Principle validates the importance of customer retention. It states that 80% of effects are derived from 20% of the causes. Think of customers as causes and revenue as the effect. Roughly 20% of your customers will account for 80% if your revenue. Those 20% supporting your revenue are incredibly valuable. Unless they just made one enormous sale, they are likely to be repeat customers.

Another thing to keep in mind is the effect of customer retention on customer lifetime value. Customer lifetime value is defined as the average value of your customers over their lifetime. The longer that you can retain your customers, the higher your retention rate will be, which generally increases your customer lifetime value. Why? Because your repeat customers are less likely to take up employee time with questions, they are already in your customer database, and they may know what they want. The cost of repeat business is far less than the cost of new business in most industries.

These mistakes are easily avoidable. Creating a unique selling proposition and marketing it to your customers can help position your brand more accurately. Look into SEO techniques that can help your brand, and avoid making SEO mistakes that can lower your brand’s ranking. Know the marketing numbers for your campaigns to ensure that your marketing is on the right track. Also, make sure to keep some attention turned towards current and past customers. They may be the best source of revenue for your brand.

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