You can build the best store or website of its kind in the world, but if you don’t market it accordingly, customers aren’t going to come to you.
For new businesses, there’s no doubt that marketing is one of the hardest things to crack. They can devise their product or service almost perfectly, but when it comes to getting people to know about it, everything suddenly changes.
There are a lot of reasons because of this, but today is going to talk about some of the common mistakes. Let’s now take a look at four classic marketing fails that often blight new business, and show what you can do to rectify your marketing plan.
Fail #1 – You don’t think about repeat customers.
A lot of companies fall into this first trap, where they just don’t think about repeat customers. They place all of their attention on obtaining new customers, and don’t have any sort of marketing designed to target existing ones.
In some ways, this is one of the worst mistakes you can make. Not only can repeat customers be a major source of business, but they can also lead to further new customers just by a word of mouth. If they are not treated accordingly, the chances of them referring your business clearly drop.
There are umpteen ways to achieve this, from treating existing customers correctly to just tapping into basic marketing strategies. In relation to the latter, some might tap into digital signage software, which targets existing customers and provides them further incentives to shop with you again.
Fail #2 – You don’t have a USP.
If you’ve been involved in business for a long period of time, you’ll hopefully know all about USPs.
In fact, your business now might already have one. However, the problem comes when you don’t market this USP. You place your marketing efforts on factors that other companies can replicate, meaning that you just don’t stand out from the competition.
Fail #3 – You don’t know what works.
Nowadays, there’s absolutely no excuse for this next fail. After all, we live in the so-called big data world, and this means that you can tap into all sorts of statistics to find out what forms of your marketing are working, and what isn’t.
Without this, your marketing plan is doomed to fail. For example, you might be placing 50% of your spend towards PPC advertising, and the other 50% towards social media advertising. However, the latter might not perform whatsoever, meaning that it’s effectively wasted. If you don’t track your marketing channels, and understand attribution, you’ll never know this and will subsequently hemorrhage money.
Fail #4 – You don’t adapt.
If you’ve got all of your ducks in order regarding the previous point, you’ll hopefully be all ready to adapt when the tides start to change. Of course, many businesses just aren’t willing to do this, and won’t deviate from their initial marketing plan under any circumstances.
This is a critical error, and one of the reasons why so many businesses fail. If you aren’t willing to change course when market conditions dictate, you will lose out to competitors who are more than willing to make these alterations in strategy.
