Business Articles
Top 12 Mistakes Small Business Owners Make With Marketing
Small business owners and managers often tell me that marketing is complex and horribly expensive. They believe that it is a hit and miss affair without any guarantees of results.
Generally, I agree with them and explain that the majority of small business owners and managers don't realize that marketing can be carried out very economically without huge outlays of money. Curiously enough, the low or no cost marketing gets results because it is targeted.
Here are twelve mistakes that small businesses commonly make in their approach to marketing. They are not exhaustive and I am sure that you know of more. These just represent the most common mistakes that I've come across during the last 35 years of dealing with small businesses.
1. No marketing. You do no marketing at all and have a passive approach to getting customers. In other words you wait for them to come to you. Furthermore, you don't have a plan to sell more to your existing customers.
2. You rely totally on word-of-mouth. All your customers come to you through word-of-mouth and you have no control over the number of customers or who they are.
3. You have advertisements that don't produce 10 times their cost. Your advertisements don't work for a wide variety of reasons.
4. You have no plan of action. You don't plan your marketing but take a random approach. Sometimes, if business is a little slow, you put an advertisement in a local paper.
5. You gratefully accept any referred customers but don't actually have a plan to create them.
6. You don't have a target market. Your target is the whole world; it is non-specific, non-directional and you will take anyone on as a customer regardless of their contribution of profit to your business.
7. You don't know the lifetime value of your customers. You have never worked out what a customer is worth to your business so you don't know. This means that you don't know how much effort you need to put into getting new customers or how much to spend.
8. You don't test and measure the results of your promotional material. Your promotional material could be good or bad. The problem is you don't know. And if you don't know, you can't fix it because you can't fix what you don't know.
9. You don't have a customer retention plan. Customers stop buying from your business for a variety of reasons. Unless you have an effective customer retention plan, your business will diminish.
10. You don't have a customer database. The most valuable asset that you have in your business is your customer list. Treat it that way and actively grow it. Your customer database will indicate those customers who have not bought from you for some time. This means that you can market directly to those "missing" customers.
11. You don't advertise your guarantee. Nobody knows about your guarantee. You keep it secret. You stand by your work but you don't tell anyone.
12. You don't use testimonials on your quotations, invoices, statements, promotional material or business cards.
