5 Marketing Sins to Avoid

Five Deadly Marketing Sins

Sometimes avoiding bad marketing is just as important as doing good marketing. Avoiding bad marketing saves time, money and wasted effort. S while we’ve all done them, and there’s many more, but try to avoid these 5 marketing sins.

1. Start / Stop Marketing –
Once you’ve started to see those customers piling through the door it’s easy to assume your marketing job is done. It’s not. Effective marketing isn’t about any single campaign or idea – it’s about all your efforts and ideas combining to create ‘marketing momentum’.

Your marketing activities should be at the forefront of your business whenever trade is good. It’s at this point when there’s already a buzz about your business and you can be confident in your approach to new customers and clients. If you stop, the momentum and flow of new business will eventually dry up and restarting it from scratch will costly and time consuming.

2. Advertising as Marketing –
Advertising is not Marketing! Well, it is, but it’s only a single tool in your marketing arsenal. Think image, customer service, your product or service itself, the way your phones are answered, your dealings with the media, networking, your website, how often the bins get emptied.

Everything that your customer or client can come in contact with is a marketing opportunity. Everything.

3. Chasing New Business –
The old adage that 80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers and clients has never been truer. Increasing competition, greater access to information through the Internet and burgeoning consumer confidence all mean that retaining loyal customers is more important, and difficult, than ever before.

Of course you need new business, but your marketing strategy needs to include ways to ensure loyalty, generate word-of-mouth buzz and increase sales volumes from your existing customer or client base. Never assume your current customers will be there forever. After all, your competitors are chasing after them right now.

4. Forgetting the Front Line -
Your staff are the front line of your marketing efforts. Are they excited? Do they treat each customer with respect? Do they look the part? What about you, do you embody the image you’d like your business to portray?

The most carefully crafted marketing message can be immediately undone by the actual customer/client experience. On the other hand, get it right, and your staff become ‘brand ambassadors’ and ‘buzz generators’ for your business.

5. Eggs All, Basket One
Marketing can, at times, be a bit fickle. What works today might not work tomorrow and what works for your competitors might not work for you. If you commit all your energies and your entire budget to a single marketing activity you’ll be in dire straits if it doesn’t come off.

Try dozens, if not hundreds, of low cost ideas, find the ones that work and then ramp them up. If an idea doesn’t work, move onto the next or find ways to ‘fix it’. You should treat your marketing like a science experiment; test and retest ideas and media to see what works for YOUR business before you commit any serious cash.