Marketing Mistakes To Avoid As A New Business

Getting your name out there as a new business requires marketing. But it’s important that you choose the right strategies so that you’re not wasting your time. Below are 5 marketing mistakes to avoid as a new business. 

Refusing to spend any money

There are a lot of ways to market a business for free from posting on social media to networking. However, if you want your marketing to have a serious impact, you’ll need to be prepared to spend some money. This is particularly important when launching a new business – this is when you want to be heavily marketing to build brand awareness. Only by paying for adverts will you build brand exposure, and only by investing in SEO will you get good rankings – you cannot achieve these things for free. 

Not using strategies suitable to your industry

There is no one-size-fits-all marketing strategy – every industry has a different goal and audience, and therefore benefits more from different marketing strategies. A t-shirt company is likely to get more leads from social media adverts than an accountancy firm. Contrastingly, an accountancy firm is likely to get more leads from SEO than a t-shirt company. To make sure you’re not focusing in the wrong areas, try to find out the best marketing practices for your industry or find a marketing company that specialises in your industry. For example, if you run a HVAC company, look for the top marketing agency that understands HVAC marketing, or research into HVAC marketing strategies yourself. 

Trying to do it all yourself

There are so many kinds of marketing which are simply best done by the professionals, and you will want to make sure that you are aware of that. If you try to do everything by yourself, you are simply going to find that you don’t get the best results, so it’s much better to make sure you get help where that is necessary. For instance, if you are using direct mail techniques, go for the best direct mail companies to help you. This is going to make a huge difference.

Failing to do competitor research

You’re likely to have some competitors and it’s important that you don’t ignore them. Competitor research can help you to a) seek inspiration for new marketing ideas to use yourself and b) help you work out a way of standing out from the crowd. It could also be important to make sure that you’re not copying any other company’s branding – you don’t want to get sued because your company name or logo is too similar to a competitor. 

Forgetting about your existing customers

Marketing is not all about attracting new customers. It’s also a means of retaining existing customers. If you don’t market to your existing customers, they may be tempted to try other companies. Keep customers in the loop about new products and deals by encouraging them to sign up to mailing lists. You may also be able to offer loyalty discounts to encourage customers to use you again. 

Ignoring your analytics 

Analytics can help you to measure the effectiveness of various different digital marketing strategies. They can help you to monitor web traffic and ad performance, which can help you to see which web pages and adverts are popular, as well as when people are clicking on them and who these people are. This can ultimately allow you to fine-tune your marketing so that it’s more effective. Without looking at analytics, you’re simply relying on trial and error, and you could waste a lot more time and money.