Marketing is something that everyone must do in order to get the word out about their business. However, there are some mistakes that you can make when it comes to marketing.
First of all, marketing is not all about you. Marketing is about branding your products and services. More importantly, marketing should focus on what those products and services can do for your customers. You need to take yourself out of the equation when it comes to marketing and instead insert your customers into the equation. Marketing deals with getting the word out about your products and services to your customers. It has absolutely nothing to do with the preferences of you or your friends.
With that said, you need to know who your audience is. If you have no clue who your targeted audience is, your marketing efforts will be truly wasted. You need to invest money and effort into determining who your products and services should target. Find out how people behave, where they live, where they work, where they make most of their purchases and who influences their buying decisions. You need to have a clear image of who you are trying to target.
If you don’t have any customer data, this is a huge marketing mistake. You need to do your research and not rely on opinion or gut instinct alone. While art and creativity play a role in your marketing program, customer data itself provides you with needed insights into new opportunities.
In addition, you cannot rely solely on examples rather than analogy. Branding and marketing are crucial aspects to any industry, especially when it comes to breakthroughs and innovations. There was a professor, Mason Cooley that once said, “Art begins in imitation and ends in innovation”. What this means is that you need to start to observe what other folks and organizations are doing.
Another common marketing mistake is that you are not shaping shared experiences. In today’s world of social media, it is no longer marketers and other forms of media that influence people’s buying decisions. Instead, it is social peers of people that influence the majority of buying decisions. In other words, marketing is all about enabling those peers. You need to roam around on social media sites and really listen to people.