It’s 2021, and if your business hasn’t figured out how to do marketing yet, where have you been?
In all honesty, marketing is a complex and difficult task that should be left up to professionals. Businesses who hire professionals to do their marketing, be that a professional marketing agency or new employees that have marketing experience are more likely to see better results from their marketing effort and a much better return on investment.
Marketing these days is much more scientific and analytics-based; it’s all very well being able to make something look and sound pretty, but if there is no point behind the post or behind the piece of marketing collateral, it was a waste of time and money.
Getting marketing right
All hope is not lost, though. It’s actually very easy to get your marketing right, as long as you follow some basic principles.
Firstly, your marketing efforts must have a point to them and a specific call-to-action. Secondly, your potential customers need to know what to do, and this means actually telling them!
Here are six common mistakes that small businesses make when they first start marketing and how you can fix them before you waste your time and money.
You’re Not Communicating Effectively With Your Customers
Communication is key, especially if your new business is selling a product or service that is very new or very bespoke.
Not only do you need to be able to communicate with your customers exactly what your product or service is, but your customers need to be able to feel free to communicate with you and ask you any questions knowing that they will get a response in a timely manner.
It’s not a very well kept secret that most customers absolutely despise using email and online forms to ask their questions because the risk of the email address being sold for spam is seen as too high.
This is why more businesses these days are investing in chat clients embedded software that customers are used to using, such as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp.
These clients can be incredibly useful for businesses, and using a dedicated chat service as an Android app or an Apple app that can combine all of these chat services into one is really useful for business owners to stop them from having to spend hours checking each channel.
Your Website Is Non Existent
Do you have a website? If not, you need to create one now!
It may seem like having a website for your business is fairly old-school, but as more customers diversify their online footprints away from specific social networks. It’s important for businesses to have their own digital landing page and home on the web.
Having a website means that you can take advantage of search engine optimization (SEO) and help your customers to find you on search results pages from Google and other search engines.
Your Website Is Too Hard To Use
You have a website, but your customers don’t want to use it? This could mean that your website is actually too difficult to use and not performing to the best of its abilities. This is almost as bad as not having a website at all!
When building your website, you need to make sure that navigation and layout are your two main priorities.
Most users don’t want to see huge swathes of text and poorly rendered images; they want to see a well-designed and easy-to-use website that gives them answers to their questions without too much effort.
You Don’t Track Conversions Properly
If you’ve managed to get people onto your website, how do you know what they’re doing, and how do you know if your website is performing to the best of its abilities?
Being able to track conversions, see where people came from, what they clicked on. And then where they went afterward – which is preferably to your store or your lead magnet- is the most effective way to know if your website is working for the purpose in which it’s intended, and it’s easy to set up in software such as Google Analytics.
Your Social Media Presence Doesn’t Reflect Your Business Ethics
Social media for many businesses is like a double-edged sword. It’s expected that nearly every business will have some kind of social media presence, even if it’s just the more business-orientated social platforms such as LinkedIn. But if your social media presence doesn’t reflect your business or your business ethic, then it’s not being used to the best of its ability.
This is where actually paying someone to do your social media management will pay you dividends in the end.
Professional social media managers will be able to monitor your social media feeds, reply to customer’s queries. Create content for each platform, and they will be able to advise you on what else your business needs to do to take your social media presence that much further and make the platform work for you, for example investing in social media advertising.
This is a really exciting opportunity for marketers, and social media professionals have changed the face of businesses overnight.
Your Business Doesn’t Blog
Do you remember back in an earlier paragraph where we mentioned search engine optimization? This is where writing blogs come in handy!
Blog writing is really good for small businesses and big businesses alike, and it has been proven time and time again that writing good and helpful blogs on your website will help to improve the traffic and to improve your ranking on Google and other search engines.
Blogs need to be kept to the niche of your business in order to work for you properly. For example, if your business is in epoxy resin flooring, it stands to reason that you will be writing blogs about flooring in the transport industry, the environmental impacts of epoxy resin, and all other blogs to do with flooring. It’s unlikely that you will be writing more generic blogs such as interior design trends or the best dog toys for chihuahuas!
