Everyone makes mistakes. We think the number one mistake made is believing marketing isn’t important. This is often closely followed by the assumption that you can do it yourself and be successful.
The good news is that mistakes allow us the opportunity to improve.
For the small business owner, making mistakes about when, where and how to market your products and services can have real impact on your ability to increase market share. Marketing done wrong can inadvertently give your competitors something to capitalize on. If you’re doing it wrong, marketing can quickly become a sinkhole, wasting valuable time and money.
Let’s take review some beginning marketing mistakes often made by small business.
1. Failure to Understand Your Target Audience
The key to creating great marketing copy is to design collateral that mirrors what the audience wants. Understanding your audience will help you highlight product features that will appeal to potential customers. Skipping this important step before creating marketing materials will likely crash your campaign.
Key Question to Consider:
What are the needs, wants, and priorities of my potential clients?
2. Forgetting “The Rule of Threes”
Your audience is busy. Believe us when we tell you that marketing your products one time will not create a sustainable competitive advantage for your business. That’s exactly why you see multiple ads for one product across TV, print, and on social media. Your brand needs to be everywhere your target audience is.
If you’re selling a service, your job is to be in front of the prospect when they need you. If you’re offering a product, you should pick one consistent selling point that sets you apart from the competition, and replicate that message across multiple marketing venues. That’s how product qualities become linked to a brand name.
Key Question to Consider:
What are the top three locations frequented by your target audience, virtually (Internet), physically (a store), or visually/audibly (television, radio, podcast)?
3. Not Sticking with Your Brand Standards
You can still pick out the young entrepreneur by the quality and consistency of their graphic design. This, despite the fact that online graphics programs (Canva) and low-cost website packages (GoDaddy) now allow pretty much anyone to attempt to create their own marketing brand. But one of the biggest mistakes we still see from the small business is marketing materials that do not consistently follow standardized brand standards across all internal and external marketing materials. Creating a set of design rules will tie together every piece of collateral in the marketplace, which will help viewers begin to recognize you over all the other businesses competing for their money.
Key Question to Consider: What is the look of my company and how consistently is it represented, including; colors, fonts, styles, types of graphics, and logo placement?
Need Marketing Help?
Artisan Talent has experts standing by to help prevent these and other common marketing mistakes in the small business. Hire a part-time, freelance, or full-time Marketing Professional to help your brand. Contact us today!
