Common Marketing Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

introduction

The marketing industry’s rapid pace and increased competition create a need for excellent marketing strategy, strong branding, and the use of analytics to measure and change your marketing efforts. Too often, businesses make the same mistakes repeatedly, which result in wasted time, money, and energy.

If you want to improve your marketing effectiveness, make sure you avoid these three common areas of failure: lack of clear marketing strategy; poor or inconsistent branding; and lack of measurement or failure to learn from the results.

Body

No defined, targeted Marketing strategy.

The Mistake

All too often, our companies cannot articulate a coherent marketing strategy and, as a result, are left to make decisions on tactics solely (e.g. “Buy Ads” or “Post on Social Media” or “Send Email Campaigns”) as opposed to aligning to the overall strategic goals.

Failure to have strategy means the marketing is reactive, Disjointed, lacking in direction and resulting in Obstacles to achieve goals.

Why It Happens

Time Constraints

1. Lack of Understanding/Imitation of Competitor Solutions without the same Context or Experience.
2. Misalignment between Leadership, Sales, and Marketing Teams within the Company.
3. Real-World Example of this Mistake:

A small ECommerce company invests in paid ads, but does not properly identify their ideal customer or what their value proposition is. Therefore people are driven to the website however, people do not convert to sales due to not understanding what the Offer is (or Who should be buying).

How can you avoid it

Having a clearly defined strategy allows you to create direction for your business and to create measurable outcomes. Key Components of a Marketing Strategy include the following:

1. Defined Business Objectives (Brand Awareness, Lead Generation, Retention)
2. Target Audience Personas
3. Core Value Proposition
4. Primary Channels (where to communicate and to what audience)
5. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)[what metrics will measure success]

Best practice example:

1. Create and document your Marketing Strategy, Update quarterly.
2. Align your Marketing Goals with your overall Business Objective.
3. Develop and Prioritize your top “High Impact” initiatives and eliminate unnecessary initiatives.
4. inconsistency in Brand Identity and Visibility

The Mistake

Branding mistakes are among the least acknowledged, yet most impactful marketing errors. A lack of cohesive messaging, visuals, and tone across multiple platforms can create confusion and a lack of confidence among customers; therefore, customers find it challenging to identify or recall a brand when there is no brand consistency.

Branding is about how people perceive a business, so it is about more than just a logo.

Why is it important?

Research has shown time and time again that consistent branding increases a business’s revenue and brand recognition. By failing to maintain brand consistency, a business not only reduces its credibility but also makes its marketing less effective.

Common Branding Mistakes are:

1. Having different brand voices on multiple platforms
2. Having an inconsistent visual identity (e.g., colours, fonts, images)
3. Frequent changes to branding messaging without a clear rationale
4. Failing to communicate a clear brand promise

A business that provides professional services presents itself as a premium brand on its website but uses casual language combined with low quality images through its social media. This inconsistency undercuts its premium positioning and lowers the level of confidence placed in it by potential high-value clients.

How to Create Consistency in Branding

To create strong and consistent branding, the following steps should be taken:

Create a style guide that includes all aspects of a business’s brand: voice, tone, visual presentation, and messaging. All teams and partners should adhere to the style guide in order to ensure that a business’s branding remains consistent.
A business’s product/service offering and value proposition, and all marketing assets should be regularly reviewed and audited to ensure they are consistent.

1. Examples of key branding elements to align with a business’s logo are:
2. Logo and Colour Palette
3. Brand Messaging and Value Proposition

Brand Tone of Voice

1. The Customer’s Experience with a Business Across All Customer Touchpoints
2. Another way to think about Branding is Different to Traditional Logo-Centric Branding.
3. Most brands create a logo that conveys their product or service and then go about their daily lives creating a message that does not connect with that logo.
4. Neglecting and Underutilizing Data, Analytics, & Optimization

Mistake

One of the key marketing missteps is failing to track or improve brand performance based on the information obtained through tracking. Companies gather tracking information about their customers and website but do not take advantage of the data collected. In fact, many times marketers fail to act based upon the analytical data or make marketing decisions based upon how they feel about certain issues.

1. Marketing without any measurement is just speculation.
2. What Are the Consequences of this Mistake
3. Underperforming marketing channels have wasted dollars.
4. Not being able to show the return on investment (ROI).
5. Missed chance to make marketing strategies more effective through optimization.

Poor decision-making.

Supporting Evidence:

Companies that have utilized a data-driven approach to marketing have far more success in acquiring and keeping customers. Analytics provide marketers with information about what works, what doesn’t, and how to optimize their marketing strategies.

Steps to Prevent this From Happening

To effectively use a performance-driven approach for your company’s marketing efforts, your company needs to continuously evaluate and improve upon the measured results of all your marketing efforts.

Actions:

1. Establish Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for each marketing campaign.
2. Available Tools/Resources: Google Analytics, CRM Systems, and Marketing Reporting Dashboards.
3. Have periodic reviews of your marketing performance.
4. Develop Test, Learn, and Optimize strategies (A/B testing and Audience Segmentation) using a consistent process.

What Are the Right Metrics?

1. Conversion rates.
2. Cost of Customer Acquisition (CAC).
3. Return on Investment (ROI).

Engagement and Retention Rates.

Example

A B2B Company has been tracking its website traffic but not tracking the quality of the leads generated or the conversion rates of those leads. By aligning its data with the revenue outcomes of its lead management and Sales processes, the company has improved its overall sales performance by nurturing leads and having a more efficient sales force.

How to Differentiate Between Vanity Metrics and Real Metrics

Some marketers focus on high-level/off-the-cuff information regarding the metrics that many times are not even relevant to how many customers are retained or acquired.

When it comes to mistakes in marketing, they’re usually not rooted in a lack of intent. Instead, they are the result of indecisiveness around creating a solid strategy, identifying or failing to identify your brand over time, obtaining the correct data, and creating a method of using the data to help you create better marketing decisions.

The types of mistakes we’ve studied so far are the following:

1. Lack of a clearly defined strategy
2. Inconsistent and/or weak brand identity
3. The inability to utilize data effectively for decision-making purposes.

To avoid these types of marketing mistakes, your company must be disciplined and unified in its efforts. Companies that apply strategic planning to its marketing activities, develop a strong brand identity that is consistent with its core values, and utilizes data-driven analytics to monitor performance will build stronger connections with their customers and experience sustained growth.

calculation

Create a clearly defined strategy for your marketing activities
Establish your brand as a strategic asset—rather than a design project—that will set your business apart from the competition.
Make data the primary driver of your marketing decisions in combination with measuring your performance.

Now is the time

to identify where your current marketing efforts are lacking from a strategy, brand, or analytics perspective. The marketplace is more competitive than ever, and avoiding these common marketing mistakes is critical in order to remain competitive and excel long-term.