AVOID MAKING MARKETING DECISIONS BASED ON GUESSES AND FEELINGS
This could be one of the most significant mistakes I would urge you to avoid when marketing your business. By not doing market research, you are leaving all of your marketing efforts, your time and your money up to chance.
On the other hand, by doing market research, you are validating your offer, the price points and the audience. This is extremely important if you want to make sales in your business.
INSTEAD, DO MARKET RESEARCH
Market research can also go as deep as understanding who your ideal customer avatar is. Understanding their pain points, understanding where they spend their time online – which will help you to choose the platforms that they are on, how they speak, so then you can tailor your messaging and use those same terms to grab their attention and understand how you are going to attract them with your various lead magnets / freebie.
AVOID MARKETING TO EVERYONE INSTEAD OF A HYPER TARGETED AUDIENCE
This is another significant mistake I would urge you to avoid. When you market to everyone, no one buys. When you are creating content and or creating your offer, and it will have to be so generic that attracts everyone, and then, by default, it will attract no one.
So it is extremely important to understand who your ideal client is so that you know exactly how you are going to market to them.
Whether they are witty, and they have a smart mouth, or they’re sophisticated, understanding if your customer is a mother or a business owner or a company itself, will help you to better make decisions in your marketing.
So marketing to everyone is another big mistake, I urge you to avoid.
AVOID FOCUSING ON BUILDING FOLLOWERS ON SOCIAL MEDIA
An email list is an asset that you will have for your online business. It is an asset because it is something that you own, as opposed to social media and your followers is not something that you own.
On social media, your account can be hacked, it can be taken down for many different reasons, and therefore you would lose the followers you were growing there. You do not own the social media platforms.
Additionally, you have to jump high and jump low, understand what type of content the algorithms favor and tailor your content to suit. All in an attempt to gain visibility and new followers.
INSTEAD, BUILD YOUR OWN EMAIL LIST
Since you do not own any of these platforms, the responsibility is with you to create an asset (something you own) that will work to grow your business.
As a business owner, your intention should be to attract people on the platforms you are on, then bring them to an email list which is something that you own.
When you have this email list, you will be able to create content for them, get them to know you and understand who you are, so you can show them all the solutions that you provide to their problem.
Let them get to know you in a better way, and lead them towards the sale. Building an email list is extremely significant to your business, because, imagine, out of all the people on social media whose attention you are trying to reach.
Your email list is a curated list of people who know have the problem that you are trying to solve, who are interested in solving that problem, and who are interested in paying to have that problem solved for them.
You have the benefit of reaching out to your email list – a list of warm leads who are ready for a transformation and for the transformation you provide.
AVOID GROWING YOUR AUDIENCE ON YOUR OWN
We can all understand that it would be impossible for us to get every single person to follow us on social media, so that is why we can benefit from leveraging each other’s audiences. There may be people who have the same audience as you, but are not in direct competition with you.
As a result, they can support you if there’s something that you are doing and vice versa. So if you have an event coming up, for example, a virtual summit, by leveraging other people’s audiences, you can ask them to advertise your summit to their audience by email.
This is a perfect way to leverage other people’s audiences, you can also benefit from it.
INSTEAD, LEVERAGE OTHER PEOPLE'S AUDIENCES
AVOID ONLY FOCUSING ON GROWING ORGANICALLY AND WITH ADS
Earned media is media that you do not own, and you do not pay for. Instead, it is a medium that would highlight and validate you, your expertise and your business. It is a third party view of you and your business.
When potential customers do research for you online, what are they seeing? They may see your different social media profiles, your website or your blog. But it strengthens you in their eyes when they see other people speaking about you.
For example, if you were a podcast guest, if you have done guest blog articles, were featured in a magazine, were a speaker on different stages for maybe different associations, events or causes. This helps to validate who you are, what you speak about, and strengthens your authenticity and your brand.
INSTEAD, USE EARNED MEDIA TO GAIN CREDIBILITY AND BUILD AUTHORITY
AVOID BUILDING YOUR BUSINESS ALONE
In a world of online business and business in general, entrepreneurship can feel tiresome, lonely, and oftentimes a struggle. But when we collaborate, we understand that we cannot do it all by ourselves.
Instead, we can work together with other people to achieve a certain goal. So you may not have an audience of 10,000 people, but if five of you come together, each of you with an audience of 1,000 to 2,000 people on your email list or on your social media, then by you hosting an event and pulling all of your audiences together, you all can grow by collaborating.
INSTEAD, USE COLLABORATION TO GROW
You all would benefit by coming together, speaking about a particular topic, or niche area in a particular topic, the other people you are collaborating with can speak about other sides of that topic.
For instance, you want to host a summit on health. One person may be speaking about meditation, prayer and spirituality, while another person would be speaking about a certain type of diets, such as plant based food nutrition, or not eating refined sugars then another person can be speaking about how you can change your diet to prevent non-communicable diseases, such as diabetes, hypertension, and high cholesterol, etc. Another person can be speaking about the cleaning of your colon and doing detoxes, etc.
So, in essence, collaborating with all of these different professionals to put together an event, you are creating a full and dynamic event that will benefit your audience. This is an example of collaboration and not competition.
AVOID SHINY OBJECT SYNDROME AND NOT STICKING TO 1 STRATEGY LONG ENOUGH
Marketing is a process which involves changing, tweaking, editing and making improvements on one version and then another and another. It is not expected that you do something once, and it would be perfect. There will definitely be iterations of that process. So, with that in mind, one strategy will not be perfect the first time it is executed. It will be important for you to stop and go back, look at the goal that was set? What was the strategy? Then evaluate the outcome and assess what needs to be changed to improve upon the results. So there is continual iteration for some time, before you decide that a strategy doesn’t work.
This is better than starting one thing, then you see what someone else is doing on social media, and then you stop, and you start doing that, only to hear a podcast host suggests something, and then you start doing that. Then before it has time to come to fruition, you read a book, and you heard something else, and you want to change your strategy.
It is important to understand what your goal is. Focus on that goal. Choose a strategy to implement, and then try to execute it. Make sure you have several different iterations to see how best you can improve to bring about that strategy, before you decide to change strategies altogether.
Marketing your business is not for the faint of heart. It is a very long process. It can be a very fun process also, but there is no, one-perfect-way to get things done.
However, if you do try to avoid these mistakes in your marketing, and instead try to see how you can apply it to your business, you could increase the quality of the leads that come into your business, develop a strategy that works and open yourself up to new opportunities to grow your business the way you want it to grow.
