Marketing Mistakes Costing You Money

Is your company making the most of its presence online? Many businesses tend to jump blindly into online marketing out of necessity, but may find themselves entangled in a mess of mistakes. If you want to make sure your company earns the sort of ROI it deserves with its web marketing, here are a few errors you can avoid or keep an eye out for.

Inconsistency

All your marketing, both on and off the web, should work towards a single consistent goal. If you’re undermining your brand and your other departments with a particular marketing approach, you’re wasting your money in multiple places.

Muddled branding

It’s extremely common for companies seeking new market segments to muddle their brands through thoughtless advertising. If you’re selling high-quality luxury goods to a wealthy market, you don’t want to get overly cutesy or casual just because you’re on social media. Think about your image, and maintain it across all channels; your blog, your social networks, your physical marketing and your emails should all portray the same brand and voice.

Surrendered channels

If you’re not present in each of the modern marketing channels, you’re surrendering those channels to competitors and their surrogates. Do you want the first Google result for your area and industry to turn up a competitor’s site without yours, or a negative review on some disgruntled, unreasonable customer’s blog? If not, then you need SEO. Want searches for you to turn up “Is this a scam?” at the top of the page? If not, then you need PPC. Marketing can be as much about denying other narratives as it is sharing your own.

Dated SEO

If you’re still following search engine optimization best practices from the nineties—or honestly even a few years ago—then you’re harming your website and throwing away traffic. Google and the other big gatekeepers of the internet have grown increasingly savvy to the way people game the system, meaning that you can’t cheat your way to excellent search rankings anymore. If you’re still using over-optimized anchor text, purchasing hundreds of directory links, and other staples of dated SEO, your site’s a ticking bomb.

Ugly designs

A website with a bad UI, a logo that’s anything but memorable, a motto with a huge typo – these sorts of design errors add up to a negative opinion of your company, something wholly divorced from the quality of your product or service. If people land on your site thanks to excellent marketing, but your site itself puts them off, you’ve undone all your efforts—because your definition of marketing is too narrow. If you want to do marketing right, you need to remember one thing: every single point of contact with a customer needs to be viewed through a marketing lens and adjusted accordingly.

Sales over relationships

Marketing designed to seal the deal rapidly without laying the groundwork for long-term satisfaction doesn’t just lose you the opportunity to obtain repeat customers, it costs you money from negative word of mouth, expensive returns, and all the other wasteful effects of consistent buyer’s remorse. Make sure you’re taking the time to nurture leads so they’re more than a sale – they’re a loyal customer.

No market segmentation

Marketing without segmentation is a colossal waste of opportunity for any business, especially in the modern era where detecting and reaching out to segments has never been easier. Remember, demographics aren’t the only way to segment your customers and prospects; you can find patterns in lifestyles, geographic regions, behaviors, and many other areas. Use your CRM and other solutions to find the surprising consistencies, and develop a tailored outreach for each group.

Lack of automation

Modern marketing means automation. If you aren’t sending out a staggered newsletter with custom content based on identified market segments, or using help from CRM to determine the best times to follow up for sales, then you’re not working efficiently enough. Many of the tasks marketers once struggled to handle manually can be left to programs; doing so gives your team far more time for tasks only a savvy human can complete.

Complacency

Marketing never ends. Look at the biggest brands in the world; do you think Coca-Cola or McDonald’s ever plan to stop looking at new channels for their marketing, new ways to present their brand, or new avenues for revenue generation? Of course not! They’ll be running new commercials on the newest forms of media until the heat death of the universe. That’s the tenacity you need! Keep educated, pay attention to new opportunities, and make sure you’re leveraging everything relevant to your industry and prospects.
If you think you may be making these mistakes, don’t fret – they can be fixed and you can recover! You just need some help from a team who has the skills to cover all of your bases. Excellent web design, responsive points of contact, videographers, copywriters, graphic designers, SEO – let Simply Design be the marketing team that takes you to the next level!