How to Avoid Marketing Pitfalls
Making mistakes in marketing is almost a guaranteed thing, especially when you’re first becoming involved with advertising and marketing. However, making as few mistakes as possible should be the goal of every professional marketer, as is trying to ensure that any mistakes are not major ones. Missteps in marketing can cost your business a ton of money, for instance, if you were to misread the needs of the purchasing public. The best way to minimize any mistakes, and keep those miscues relatively small, is to follow the recommendations below.
Know your target audience
Knowing your target audience means that you understand their wants and needs, as well as their pain points, i.e., exactly what problems they need to solve in their daily lives. When you can walk a mile in your customers’ shoes, you’ll have a good understanding of what motivates them to buy, and you’ll be able to tailor your sales pitch to that specific aspect of your product characteristics.
Monitor and Track Performance
The only way you can know how well you’re doing with a given marketing campaign is to track the performance of one. This will give you priceless feedback, so you’ll know if your message is falling on receptive ears. It will also tell you what kinds of changes should be made to your message, so it resonates more fully with consumers. If your campaign is doing very well, you can take the good points from it and use them again in the future.
Streamline Processes
Any kind of waste in the business world can be considered a reduction from your bottom line. To maintain a healthy profit margin, you’ll need to eliminate waste in all its forms and streamline your processes for maximum efficiency. For instance, any unnecessary effort made in marketing will simply go unnoticed by consumers, but it will probably carry a certain amount of cost that you just can’t afford.
Identify Customers across platforms
If you’re using a great many channels to reach the maximum target audience, you’ll need to ensure that your message is consistent across all those channels and platforms. You don’t want to create confusion in the minds of the public, so it’s best to develop a consistent message and use that everywhere. You must also identify your target audience on each of the platforms you use because they are likely to exhibit different behaviors across each of those platforms. Keep your message consistent with consumer behavior, regardless of where they receive the information.
Map your customer’s journey
The purchasing journey has several major milestones along the way, but your goal is to nudge potential customers to that final stage, where they make a purchase from you. You need to know exactly the stage that customers are at, so you can appeal to them at that point, and urge them to take the next step. By nurturing and guiding your customers along their purchasing journey, you can increase the likelihood that they’ll make it all the way to the end and become loyal paying customers.