Ten Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

Marketing has become an increasingly competitive, innovative and exciting sector in recent years – to the extent that many agencies are trail-blazing new and exciting ways to find customers and engage consumers in their brand. But one of the unfortunate side-effects of this change is the unavoidable mistakes that are being made across the industry – some by big, important players in the marketing game. If you’re looking to avoid any errors in your marketing output, this handy five-point guide will show you where you might go wrong in your 2020 marketing strategy.

Don’t Bore

One of the most important considerations in the modern attention economy is to avoid boring your readers, consumers, customers and web users. If you’re marketing a product, the key thing to remember is that you need to be exciting, or you’ll alienate the world’s consumers. You need to have a hook, and to offer real value in whatever you’re proposing. It’s a mistake to rush off poor-quality content – it’ll only turn people off from your brand.

Not Targeting

There’s no doubt that the future – indeed, for many businesses, the present – of digital marketing is targeted adverts. These are a whole lot more effective that the fire-from-the-hip adverts from yesteryear and they have the added benefit of showing that you’re in tune and on the same wavelength as your target consumers. You’ll add value, without spending more cash. If you fail to target, you’ll irritate more people with your advert, which will ultimately hit your bottom line and your return on investment.

Forget Outbound Marketing

One of the biggest mistakes you can make, as alluded to in the previous point, is to spray online adverts in the hope that you’ll find people who appreciate your brand. This style of marketing has recently been dubbed ‘outbound marketing’ and is seen as outdated and a scourge on the online lives of millions of web users every single day. As such, you should use inbound marketing in your 2020 strategy. Read this article from Web Presence to get a better idea of what you’ll gain from this particular tip.

Be Personable

Using social media is an excellent way to be personable in the modern media environment. Too many consumers feel like they’re not valued in the modern marketing ecosystem – taken for fools by professional yet cold marketing campaigns. That’s a big mistake to make in 2020. Instead, you can use social media and other branded blog posts to convey an upbeat and fun message, without alienating your target consumers.

Thinking Short-Term

There’s a great deal of debate about the thinking of businesses in the modern era. One big mistake, highlighted by countless business leaders and analysts, is to only think in the short-term. If you strategize based on this, you’ll lose customers in the long-run. It’s far better to make longer-term plans in order to find the most effective way for you to engage repeat customers and build real value and prestige around your brand.

Alienating Individuals

While targeting is all well and good – and ought to be one of your priorities in inbound marketing campaigns – you don’t want to do it at the expense of your following. As such, make sure to consider each and every piece of content that you publish in your campaign, and decide whether it’s something that will engage more people, or start to isolate some individuals. Your aim is to excited and engage – not alienate.

Simple Errors

When you’re rushing around a content creation department, trying to put together material in order to run your campaign, it’s easy to stumble and make some mistakes that slip through your editor’s net. It’s a natural part of working in a fast-paced industry and environment – but that’s not to say it should be permissible. Be careful with your content, shaping it to standard and vetting it for mistakes, in order to be taken seriously when you do publish your work to the public.

Failing to Measure

Marketing campaigns aren’t conducted in isolation. They’re executed after strenuous research into what may work best – and you need to monitor the results in order to understand how, where, and why your campaigns went wrong or right. As such, build a monitoring process into your campaign, so that you can continue your trial and error adjustments to help you build the best possible campaign for you and your team to benefit from in the long-term. Measures can include the number of hits on adverts, clicks onto your website, emails opened, and of course – sales made. By collating all of this evidence, you’ll be left with a clearer picture of how well each campaign is doing under your supervision.

Misallocation of Resources

Another element to your overall plan that can go awry is your allocation of funds. Make sure that the money you invest in your campaign is targeted at the most promising campaigns – those that will return the highest value on your investment. Without such a system, you’ll be wasting money and making problems for yourself and your marketing team down the line. Be efficient, be cost-effective, and be confident that you’re delivering the best possible value to your company or your clients.

Holistic Marketing

The new trend in marketing is to think not just about an individual advert or a single tweet – it’s about something wider. It’s about looking at the journeys that consumers and customers take with your brand, and how they might like to interact with you on a future basis. And, most of all, this is about avoiding mix-ups and errors in your overall marketing strategy, that might end up confusing your audience and delivering them mixed messages that they take as confusing and worrying. Remember that you want to be valued and trusted – and the journeys that you curate with and for your audience must be respectful of that particular aim.

There you have it: ten ways in which you can avoid marketing mistakes in 2020 and beyond – and make your campaigns as successful as possible. If you iron out all your most common errors, you’ll see excellent results delivered to your company, or your client, in the form of web traffic and sales.