by Patrick Zuluaga, PMZ Marketing [Download Article]
As a business you need to ensure every marketing dollar you invest is working for your business effectively. This is even more important today with the world economy in turbulence. Make sure you avoid these six frequent marketing mistakes:
- No Specific Target Market – Attempting to interest everyone undermines your marketing efforts and results. >> You must have a clear target customer profile for your marketing message so that your offer will be relevant and appealing to them.
- No Clear Marketing Message – Marketing messages that are complex, too clever or too long can easily miss your target customers entirely and waste your efforts because no one gets it. >> Prepare a specific customer profile for your message and communicate with them as if you are in a one on one conversation.
- Focusing only on New Business – Spending all your efforts on securely new business opportunities to the detriment of your current customers. >> Your existing customers are most valuable to your business. You must continue to improve your customer relationships with marketing programs designed to increase repeat business.
- Relying on only one Medium – Putting your entire marketing budget in one communication medium or campaign limits your reach to only a portion of your potential customers. >> You need an integrated approach across different communications mediums using direct response marketing.
- Thinking Short-term – One shot marketing to reach out to your prospective customers does not work. >> You need to reach out to your prospects with at multiple touch points to build a level of comfort before they are willing to do business with you.
- Changing a Winning Message – I have seen this quite often with the business owner or manager tiring of the message and thinking they must change it because it is getting boring to them or because they think they have to. >> Your effort must be on knowing why it is winning and testing ways to ramp it up to increase the results even more as a tried and true formula will often keep winning with its target market.
