Avoid five marketing mistakes

The following is a list of the top five marketing plan mistakes.

Some of them I have seen other businesses make, and a few I’ve made myself.

Do yourself a favor, and learn from my mistakes not your own.
Top 5 Marketing Plan Mistakes

1. Not Specific Enough

The first step of any good marketing plan is to identify the market you will be targeting with your marketing and advertising efforts.

Where businesses go wrong is they do not get specific enough with whom they are targeting. It may be nice to think you’ll just target everyone, and if you get just 1% of everyone to buy your products - success!

Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way. Using a shotgun, hope I hit everyone, approach is inefficient and costly. You’re much better off spending your marketing time and money targeting a very specific group of consumers who want what you are selling.

Even the largest of companies do this. Think about how Coke markets their product. While it may seem they just want everyone to buy a Coke, their marketing and advertising certainly isn’t targeting everyone.

Your target market definition should be detailed. Such as “I want to target males aged 25-35 who have and interest in basketball and have attended a professional basketball game in the last year”. Much better than just targeting males nationwide.

2. Forget Current Customers

Often times we get so focused on the new customers our marketing and advertising efforts will bring us we forget the loyal customers we already have.

If all your marketing plans only target new customers - - how do you think your current customers feel? A little left out of all the fun most likely.

Blend your marketing and advertising so that you are putting as much time and effort into your current customers, so they continue to be customers, and those new acquisitions. Remember growth comes from two avenues. New customers, and current customers buying more than they have in the past.

3. Think Marketing Only Means Advertising

If your marketing plan is only focused on the advertising part, you’re missing a big piece of the puzzle. Just putting out advertisements, is not the entire mix of marketing that is necessary to bring you more buyers.

Brand management, networking, market research, customer support, and a sales strategy are all pieces of the marketing puzzle that you will be missing if you focus your plan only on advertising. Advertising is a piece of it, but marketing is the comprehensive approach to getting your products into the consumers hands.

4. Don’t Set a Budget Up Front

You’re excited to get your message out to your target market, and sometimes it seems like a “at any cost” proposal. However for any plan to be successful you will need to set a budget up front.

You should have a good idea of how many new customers you expect from any marketing and advertising efforts you do. So if you think a direct mailing will bring you 100 new customers who spend $10 a piece, it wouldn’t make sense to spend $10,000 to get those customers.

Also, what you will find is that as you look into different areas of marketing your products it will be really easy to just keep adding to your mix. Without a budget going in, and a set spending limit, it is very easy to get caught up in the euphoria and allow, as project managers would say, scope creep.

5. Not Tracking Results

I’m surprised by how many businesses do not track the results of their marketing efforts.

Usually they say “Yeah we put an ad in the paper, and got a few customers from it”. See the problem with that? How do you know that was the most efficient use of your marketing dollars? How many new customers did you get exactly? How much did they spend? How does this compare to other marketing avenues you explored?

These are all questions you should be able to answer, and without tracking your results you’ll be in the dark about what’s working.

Think about this going in. Ask yourself how you will track the performance of each piece of the marketing mix, and then compare the results to other types of marketing and advertising your doing.
Summary

If your business takes proactive steps to ensure you’re not making these mistakes as you develop your marketing plan, you will put yourself miles ahead of most of your competition. Part of the problem is the excitement that comes with advertising and marketing your products, and dreaming about all those new customers you’ll be getting. Be diligent, thorough, and systematic with your plan and you’ll be just fine.

What do you think? Was there anything I missed…let me know in the comments section below.