Creating a winning marketing strategy is one of the most stressful and overwhelming components of being a business owner. Many don’t even know where to start and survive blunder after blunder before embracing a strategy that actually works.
There are three marketing mistakes that business owners make constantly, and it puts them in a place where they’ve wasted valuable time and money on endeavors that just WON’T work for them.
- It’s not understanding which marketing works best for their business
- Discounting their prices
- Not tracking their marketing results.
What Marketing Works Best for My Business?
Marketing is not one-size-fits-all.
Marketing for your business may require very different tactics depending on your industry, target audience, company size, etc.
Next, you can determine the marketing goals for your business. Some examples include:
- Do you want to increase brand awareness
- Do you want to acquire new customers
- Or, Increase revenue?
Now that you have your goals for marketing, then you can decide which type of marketing would be best for you. There are three common types of marketing:
- Direct Marketing focuses on mail, email, and telemarketing efforts
- Online/ Digital Marketing focuses on social media, website, and SEO efforts
- Social Media Marketing focuses on networking and strategy
You can decide which one will work best for your business depending on the goals that you have, but please note that these things could be its own job.
Be very conscious of the time commitment for each of these and keep that as a factor when deciding which marketing activity you should pursue. You may also consider delegating this to other team members out outsourcing it.
Should Businesses Market Discounts?
Discounting is a mistake. Period.
Think about it. Stores often categorize items at high, middle, and low-price cost. Humans typically assume that the cheapest item probably has the lowest quality. However, when you buy a higher-priced item, whether the quality is superior remains to be seen.
What we can see in these cases, however, is that the marketing strategy behind the higher end ticket was superior, because they obtained a higher profit for essentially the same product
There’s a difference between discounting and creating value. Discounting is the worst mistake you can make in business. Price-focused shoppers who aren’t loyal will only stay around when you offer more discounts, in which case, you’ve lost the customer and profit. Essentially, your target audience will wait for the next discount instead of buying the full price item.
Adding value is giving something away that adds value to the overall sale but doesn’t cost you much. For example, if you pay $1,000 for a jacket and it’s discounted at 10 percent, you’ve saved $100. But if the seller instead includes a shirt worth a retail value of $140 (an item the seller paid $30 for) in the sale as an added value, the overall worth of the interaction is increased as well as the perception of the brand.
Remember, if you are cheaper than your competitor, you are telling the market that you are not as good as your competitor. Price according to the market, not cost, or discounted competitor pricing.
How Do I Know if My Marketing Works? Testing and Measuring.
If you are not testing and measuring, you will not know if the marketing works or what changes made the biggest impact.
Follow this rule: Don’t make change unless you can measure it. Don’t make sweeping change without isolating the key variables that are driving the largest results.
Another thing to consider with testing and measuring is testing small.
We may be tempted to put all of our resources into one opportunity that seems really great with a large time and money commitment, instead of trying it for a little and seeing if it works for them. And then they are stuck into a long-term commitment that they are wasting money on.
The first key to killing it with marketing is understanding the needs of your business. If you need help with this, book a complimentary coaching session with us for a deep dive into your business to understand what underperforming areas that marketing can fix.
