Do you make these seven costly mistakes with your marketing?
1. Not knowing your market. Try the who-why-how-where-when approach to solving this problem: Who buys your product or service? Why do they choose yours? How do they find you? Where do these people “hang out” (either geographically, or in terms of where they gather information)? When is the best time of day, week, month, year, or lifetime to reach them with your marketing message? A scattershot approach to selling is a waste of your time and money.
2. Not having a USP. This mistake is related to the first one. Your USP, or unique selling proposition, is what makes you, your business, your product or service the best and only solution to your customer’s problem. If you don’t know what yours is, you can’t use it to convince your prospect to choose you.
3. Not speaking to your audience in the right voice. This one is also related to the first two. Once you’ve figured out who your audience is and how to reach them, you need to speak to them in the right voice, or they aren’t going to listen to you. The same product or service may target a number of different audiences; you need messages customized to each. Let’s take one example: cell phones. Teens and tweens need cell phones to be cool, fit in, and stay in touch with their friends. Elderly people need cell phones so they can get help if they get lost or hurt when they’re alone. Same product–different message.
4. Spending money on the wrong things. One is an over-the-top website with fancy technology but little sales copy; another is ad agency advertising. Razzle-dazzle entertains but it doesn’t make the sale. Compelling copy with a clear call to action does.
5. Not advertising. If you have a good product or service, eventually word-of-mouth advertising may reach your audience. But can you wait that long? Some kinds of advertising are expensive…some are relatively inexpensive…some are even free. But seeing your business fail because you’ve spent time and money developing a product that the public never finds is the most expensive mistake of all.
6. Not staying in touch with your customers. Your least expensive and most profitable customers are those who’ve bought from you before. Keep them updated with useful information, announcements of specials and sales, and customer-relations-building freebies–and they’ll think of you whenever they’re ready to buy.
7. Doing everything yourself. The key to effective use of time and money is outsourcing. If you’re the most qualified person to run your business, that’s what you should be doing. Hire people to do the rest: bookkeeping, filing, cleaning, tax preparation, web design, and marketing. If you’re not a marketing professional, you should no more be wasting time on that than you should on those other tasks.
So, marketer, if you’ve been making any–or all–of these costly mistakes, the sooner you stop making them, the sooner you stop losing money and start making money. Find a professional copywriter and talk to him or her about your project–today.
Lisa J. Lehr is a freelance copywriter specializing in direct response and marketing collateral, with a special interest in the health, pets, specialty foods, and inspirational/motivational/self-help niches. She has a degree in biology, has worked in a variety of fields including pharmaceuticals and teaching, and has volunteered for many causes including special-needs kids and literacy. When she’s not writing, she enjoys reading, art, music, outdoor exercise, and all things Celtic and Renaissance.
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