The development of a successful marketing strategy is easier said than done. But it is inevitable as the success of your business depends on it; so much so that organized marketers have reported experiencing a 674% increase in success likelihood compared to their unorganized counterparts. There are numerous influential factors to consider in business marketing and missing any of them can wreak havoc on your progress. Additionally, it is important to avoid pitfalls while developing your strategy.
But are you aware of the best means to do so?
If not, then worry not. This blog details the various measures you can take to avoid marketing traps and make your marketing strategy a profitable one. You will also learn about the variety of marketing avenues available at your disposal and some common mistakes to watch out for while developing your bespoke plan.
The Marketing Mistakes That Can Harm Your Progress
The need to increase brand visibility against stiff competition often compels stakeholders to act on business processes with haste. If you do this with marketing, you’re bound to make some mistakes. These mistakes can also originate from a lack of experience in the field. It helps to be aware of the common mistakes that can creep into your plan and tarnish your efforts.
The likely marketing mistakes that you could be making are:
Lack of Focused Targeting
Without identification of a target audience, any marketing effort will mimic an aimless shot. Research has shown that meaningful marketing and messages that highlight the target user’s personal relevance perform very well. On the contrary, generic messages tend to ignore what a customer wants. This may result in people not connecting with your messaging and ignoring you. Such prospects won’t convert as they may not learn how they can benefit from your products/services.
Focusing On Features Instead of Benefits
Suppose you have created an amazing product or are offering a unique service that you think has the potential to become the next big thing. It would be natural to go about detailing it in your marketing efforts with enthusiasm, hoping its features will help you gain a large market share. However, you may find that those marketing efforts are only gaining a lukewarm reaction from the audience.
When this happens, it could be because you are only detailing the features of your product/service and not its benefits. People respond more positively if you explain how your offerings are beneficial to them. Often, listing ten benefits can get the job done where listing a hundred features cannot.
Exaggeration of Benefits
You want your target audience to not think less of your offering, so you add a bit of flair when marketing it or make obviously outlandish claims about its features and benefits in the name of creativity. The trouble is, when a customer discovers that your claims do not match the solution’s capabilities, it will lead to negative marketing.
When your product/service fails to meet the claims, you can expect a backlash. Besides the loss of brand value, you could end up with lawsuits that drain your budget. Just ask Red Bull about their $13 million settlement for just such a gaffe.
Not Being Data-Driven
The modern world runs on data, and so should your marketing efforts. Going full throttle into the market relying on assumptions, intuition, hearsay, and outright ignorance can only end up with you hitting the metaphorical wall at full speed. You are also likely to leave your target audience confused about your offering, or even put them off because you may have offended them in some way.
Gathering extensive market data through various means and ensuring that they are without quality issues helps a great deal. You will reach the right stakeholder with the right message at the most opportune time, enabling easy conversion.
Not Doing Marketing at All
You may proceed with a product/service launch with the assurance that your brand name is enough to market it, based on loyal customers’ interest. If this is your marketing strategy, then you shouldn’t be surprised if your Return-on-Investment hits rock bottom.
You can only rely on word of mouth to a certain extent, despite its potential. The continuous inundation of messaging from other brands can make yours slip from your target audiences’ minds. Trying to be a maverick in your industry without marketing is a risky move. And you must not miss marketing for already existing customers too, even if it is in the form of gentle reminders like an email ad or a newsletter.
The 10 Marketing Strategies to Skyrocket Your Profits
Marketing is a balance between spending money and gaining exposure. Maximizing the latter without exceeding your budget gives high ROIs and low Advertising Costs of Sale (ACoS). To achieve that, you need to combine skillful strategy development with a solid value offering.
Also, incorporating these well-established marketing strategies into your efforts is key to making them worthwhile:
1. A Professional Website
It may come as a surprise that even today, 1 in 4 small businesses don’t have a website. You cannot afford to be one among them. At the same time, you can’t have a website for the sake of it. It must come packed with all the necessary features to keep visitors informed and engaged. It should also be well-optimized so that it can rank high in search results.
The website’s layout and theme must carry your brand elements like logo and colors prominently. It must be user-friendly to help visitors navigate it easily. The information contained must be a balance between explaining your offerings in a creative manner and being brief about it. Components like images, videos, animations, audio, etc. must be placed strategically to enhance the user experience. The UI should be mobile-ready, as most browsing happens through mobile devices. Its SEO elements like keywords, meta description, etc., should be on point for the maximum chance at organic marketing on search engines. Additionally, the website must be future-ready to incorporate new technologies.
Having such a professional website boosts your visibility and brand value even beyond your intended market while also building customer trust.
2. Traditional Marketing
Digital marketing gets much of the attention today and not without reason. However, that doesn’t mean that traditional marketing methods are not worth pursuing. In fact, in some cases, there is no digital equivalent to it, and its overall impact remains strong. The options available here are cold calling, cold texting, outdoor banners, billboard/hoardings, postal letters, brochures, flyers/leaflets, exhibition/conference stalls, seminars, television, radio ads, and corporate gifting (in cases where such methods are applicable).
The last one, in particular, is known to produce lasting impressions alongside the expansion of brand awareness. This is why the corporate gifting market is growing even today with no signs of slowing down.
3. Strong SEO Implementation
Want cost-effective marketing that has far-reaching effects? Then, you need to have your SEO game intact. It is the bedrock of organic digital marketing, a set of techniques that can influence search engine algorithms to prioritize your website over those of your competition. Keyword selection strategy is vital to a successful SEO campaign. There must be a correct combination of primary, secondary, and long-tail keywords to relate your website content to customer search terms.
Ditto with eCommerce product pages. Creative product descriptions with the correct formatting and keyword placement get prioritized in search results. Images also contribute to SEO, with the correct selection, number, placement, and editing working to help the algorithm index the site better. An accurate sitemap detailing the website is crucial for technical SEO along with meta descriptions, title tags, alt tags for images, etc. However, handling so much can get overwhelming; an SEO virtual assistant is a great asset to have to accomplish such SEO goals efficiently and cost-effectively.
4. “How-To” Content Creation
One of the best ways to appeal to customers as a business is to publish blogs, videos, and other such content detailing everything about your brand, product, and service propositions. You must inform your new and prospective customers about your services and how they can be beneficial.
Video tutorials via sites like YouTube have found favor across market segments due to their ease of access and understanding. If a video tutorial can address a customer problem in a step-by-step manner, it will be consumed by many, racking up views and brand visibility. It’s a similar case with blogs and forum-based content that you can post on your website or third-party platforms like Medium. You could also answer queries in the dedicated Q&A section on your e-Commerce site’s product pages.
5. Social Media Involvement
Digital marketing is not complete without a strong social media presence. You must have your company’s account across as many platforms as necessary for the best chance at customer outreach, since nearly 58.4% of the world uses social media. You must tailor your messaging to suit the platform’s features and ethos, like going formal on LinkedIn and image-heavy on Instagram.
In addition to brand image improvement and reach enlargement, social media can also help businesses in many other ways. You can retarget customers with Facebook’s Pixel facility that collects data from every visitor to your site. You can mine a lot of professional and personal data via LinkedIn for ad targeting. Social media is also the way to engage directly with your customer base and prospects. Applying a dedicated social media strategy can grow your brand on these sites organically and you can get good spots for paid ads too. It only requires you to be trendy and active on the sites.
6. Influencer Marketing
An offshoot of social media marketing, influencer marketing involves paying an established social media personality to market your offering via their SM channels. With this, you get access to the large pool of audience (that the influencer has accumulated) in one go. You can build your brand image using their personal brand as a base.
However, the trick to this marketing technique is finding an influencer with the right audience group and reputation. Opting for a professional influencer management service gets you the right kind and number of influencers for your requirements. You simply have to pay a small commission and your brand gets spread across horizons. You can also partner with popular bloggers for affiliate marketing purposes and lead customers to your eCommerce product pages through backlinks in their blogs.
7. Latest Software Tools/Automation Adoption
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) have revolutionized all aspects of businesses, including marketing with their tools for video annotation. Combined with software tools like Customer Relationship Management (CRM), they can boost your marketing efforts exponentially while keeping costs low.
For instance, AI chatbots can engage with customers round the clock, aiding your customer support setup. AI can also help sort your eCommerce store’s inventory based on predetermined categories, making product advertising a breeze. Automated email advertisements and responses help increase brand visibility and trust.
8. Localization
Be it your product/service offering or its associated marketing messaging, localization is a must for your business to lay a strong foundation in a market. This is because every market is different, with varying demographics, culture, language, needs, aspirations, etc. A product and marketing strategy that works well in one may not do so in another. And with 46% of Google searchers looking for local product/service/information, localization is more important than ever.
Google also prefers local businesses in its search results. So your SEO should be tuned for maximum local visibility. If you’re an eCommerce entrepreneur selling internationally via a platform like Amazon, you should optimize your Amazon listing and messages according to each market’s specific demands and behavior.
9. Referral Marketing
Your customers can act as a potent marketing mechanism if engaged in referral marketing. For a small discount, offer, or gift, you can make them add more people to your customer network. If you provide them with a great shopping/business engagement experience, they may recommend you to their peers for free. This can happen offline or online through word-of-mouth or via social media connections. The more people that you engage like this, the more likely you’re to experience exponential growth in brand visibility.
10. Reviews and Follow-Ups
No matter how good your marketing plan is, it will eventually become outdated. You must refresh it periodically in line with changing market dynamics and business direction. Give it a thorough review regularly to ensure that your marketing efforts remain relevant and profitable.
Follow up on your previous customers to refresh your brand name in their minds. Offer special discounts if needed to entice them to buy from you again. Sending gift cards with personalized messages entrenches the connection they have with your brand.
In Conclusion
Marketing in today’s times is a broad field of opportunities for businesses to capitalize upon and experience unprecedented growth. Multiple avenues in both traditional and digital marketing have made it possible to reach vast numbers of people quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively. All you need is a robust, data-driven marketing strategy that addresses the needs of your target audience. Seeking professional help towards its development and implementation, like using Amazon virtual assistants, will sweeten the deal further. You can experience profitability with low ACoS, getting the best of both worlds for the present and the future.
Author Bio:
Sophie Hayes is an eCommerce consultant and a keen blogger. She holds eleven years of experience in SEO, eCommerce PPC, online website, marketplace & store optimization, and performance management. She is currently engaged with Team4eCom in the USA. She has written articles and contributed posts to several websites. Her most-written niche includes eCommerce store setup, SEO, social media marketing, listing optimization, marketplace-specific content like Amazon marketing and PPC, eBay account management and Walmart marketing.
