If you are a small business owner or entrepreneur, you already know the importance of marketing your product or service. After all, if the customers don’t know you exist, you’ll have a hard time drumming up enough business to keep your doors open. These are three of the most common mistakes that business owners make when marketing their brand.
- Poor Branding Choices
Bad branding decisions can happen in the store or in outgoing marketing, they can happen online and off, and they can be absolutely devastating. I recently walked into a small retail store that was just trying to get off the ground. The owner was worrying about competing with larger, more established businesses in the context of outgoing advertising, but had failed to consider what his customers would see when they eventually did walk in the door: bare brick walls with uneven streaks of old paint on them, exposed plaster and dry wall, and rickety, beat up display shelves.
The most important thing any business owner needs to keep in mind is offering value and quality to their customers, but if presentation didn’t matter no company would be wasting their money on signage and commercial décor. Walking into that store did not make me feel inspired to spend, nor was my first reaction to assume that his product would be professional, since it wasn’t presented in a professional fashion. Had he simply invested a portion of his startup capital in touching those shelves up, maybe put up a couple of custom printed wallpapers with his brand name or logo, and it would have been an entirely different experience.
- Poor Market Research
The market research stage is often the most overlooked in the process. After all you came up with a great idea, so you probably know who will want to pay for it, right? Wrong. Absolutely wrong. While you may have an idea of what your ideal customer looks like, or which market segments are most likely to be interested in the product or service that you’re offering, market research will tell you so much more.
Thorough market research should delve into the cost of operating your business, the pricing used by your competitors, and the attitudes, cultures, and purchasing behaviors of the market segment most likely to do business with you. If your business deals with an existing industry, you should also research the way that it has reacted to different economic and social circumstances over time through market trend analysis. It should also give you an idea of the effectiveness of different marketing strategies that others have used over time, which can provide your business with a genuine advantage over less informed competitors.
- Poor Campaign Planning
Once you have armed yourself with as much information as possible, implementing it wisely can be difficult, but it will be impossible without careful planning. There is a reason that we use the term ‘marketing campaign:’ it should be as coordinated as a military assault, with all fronts covered and all possible outcomes considered.
If your market research suggests that your target demographic should be young shoppers, but you make newsprint the central focus of your advertising, you will have no one to blame but yourself when it fails to yield results. By the same token, allowing yourself to market only to your ideal customers limits your potential for growth. This means that even if your target is teenagers, you should probably expand your marketing efforts beyond Facebook and Twitter to include other channels. Coordinating an overall campaign based on the broadest possible appeal, without neglecting or overlooking your ideal customers requires planning and foresight, and businesses that fail to plan ahead very rarely prosper.
Author Info:
Chris Garrett is a freelance writer with many years of experience in marketing for small businesses. He is fascinated by the way technological advancements continue to change the way we do business and what customers expect from the companies they visit.
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