Top brands may be making millions on a daily basis, however they’ve lost equally as much by making simple mistakes. Luckily, they have learned their lesson quickly and managed to cut their losses. If you want to enjoy the same success they currently flaunt, you need to up the game as well.
First, it is important to control your expenses. This can be done by firing additional staff, knowing how to rent the right property, and reducing all other expenses, no matter how small they are. But, this is not it. You need to work on marketing as well, as a large chunk of your expense goes into marketing.
To help you in this regard, given below are costly marketing mistakes you need to eliminate from your books altogether.
#1) Assuming that You Have One Average Customer
Traditionally, brands step in their clients’ shoes to identify their average customers and attract and convert them. Unfortunately, this method costs them millions because:
- All Businesses Have More than One Customer – Brands can easily have up to five client personas depending on what they offer. For instance, if you’re in the real estate business, you need to go beyond your ideal customers, which may be 40-something couples with at least two children. Your personas should also include millennial couples purchasing their first home, successful Gen X couples who want a bigger home for their expanding families, and retired couples who seek to build their dream homes.
- You Cannot Be Your Customer or Fit in their Shoes – You need to eliminate the ‘if I’ scenario from your web strategy as you’re not the client. Instead, listen again to whatever your clients had to say and use the data they have already shared with you. Better yet, initiate a conversation with your customers to learn about their needs as well as keep them engaged.
#2) Putting Your Brand Above Everything
You may be wasting thousands of dollars on creating and scrapping logos, selecting color schemes, and researching for a brand name. However, a useful or unique product priced just right may offer your customers more value and ensure more sales. In fact, over innovation has been known to kill sales as sometimes all your clients want is simplicity. Take the eCommerce solution Standish for instance; after investing in a top of the line design, the company experimented with a $ 350 design that repulsed its own experienced designers only to have sales increase by 350% overnight.
#3) Spreading Yourself Thin
As a marketer, you may be tempted to have your presence on every social network and online platform you find. Even if you do have the funds for spreading yourself across these, your efforts may backfire since you’ll stretch yourself thin. Your employees will be driven up the wall trying to maintain your networks and engage your fans there. If they miss a single opportunity, your brand will be at the risk of social media suicide. Therefore, make better decisions and connect with your fans through select social networks. Use your money to carry out thorough research and development so that your efforts help your business succeed rather than lose funds.
Understand where your customers are. For example, if you sell cookbooks covering healthy recipes for bodybuilders, you should use Facebook, Instragram etc. In such a case, platforms like LinkedIn will not be of much use since they are mainly for businesses.
#4) Not Proofreading Content
You may smile at the thought of a single spelling mistake costing your business millions. However, even the BBC points out that a single misspelled word can cut online sales in half. Consumers grow concerned as a result of these, doubting the website’s credibility. A good example of how a single spelling mistake can cause millions of dollar’s worth of damage is Yellow Pages’ blunder when it advertised exotic travel agency Banner Travel
Services as a forte in ‘erotic’ destinations. This mistake cost the publisher its $ 230 monthly listing fee and a $ 10 million lawsuit.
If you need another incentive to get a reliable editor or proofreader, remember that Google puts a lot of emphasis on quality, error-free content. Though the IT mogul itself has avoided confirming or denying the use of proper grammar and spelling to rank websites, it would make sense to thoroughly proofread your content before publishing to ensure its overall quality.
#5) Offering Ungated Content
One of the biggest and costliest mistakes digital marketers make is offering content for free all the time. Considering the fact that you paid a generous sum to have this posted on your website, you’ll be missing out on millions of dollars in sales. Now this doesn’t mean that you should have your prospects and customers pay you for your content. That will only chase them away further. What you need to do is set up a form where you get their contact details in return for your content. That way, you can use that information for lead nurturing and other marketing efforts. Also, you can offer some products for free and ask them to buy the rest, such as the first chapter of your eBook as a demo.
If these mistakes are what caused most of your losses so far, fix them and you’ll be on your way to generating more revenue in the future. Remember that results may take some time to show, but with proper efforts you will see improvement in your bottomline.
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