7 Deadly Marketing Sins
20% of small businesses fail within the first year and commit marketing sins. This number jumps to 50% by the end of the fifth year. Businesses that fail have issues in common similar to businesses succeeding have winning strategies in common. If you make these mistakes you will be destined to fail. We’re here to help prevent you from living every business owners nightmare. Read on to learn from the mistakes of thousands of failing businesses.
1. Unwilling To Invest
Prior to running a business you need to understand and be prepared to invest money. Too often owners will ignore the importance of investing into their marketing. Startups invest only 10% and later report wishing they would have put in 25% of their overall budget. Marketing is a major component in business that helps the world know who you are. Do not make the detrimental mistake of ignoring this. Your future successful business will thank you for it.
2. Not Tracking ROI Performance
Failing to track return on investment performance will get you nowhere except to losing your business. There’s tech out there to help make tracking easy and efficient so take full advantage. Define your goals and let the numbers speak for themselves. You’ll give yourself the opportunity to see where you’re succeeding and what areas need improving. Not tracking can lead to burning through thousands of dollars if you continue to run campaigns that do not work. Ask yourself, “what am I spending and what am I getting in return?” Some examples of what to measure include leads, conversions, traffic and click-through rate.
3. Not Writing Blogs
You might not know it, but ignoring the importance of writing blog content is costing you thousands in web traffic. Blogs help you build a relationship with potential customers who can bring in consistent revenue to your business. Find strategic ways to connect to your audience and provide value so when they’re finished reading they can say they learned something new. Optimize your blogs for high SEO performance and use social media to promote your content. This will help maximize the number of readers and visitors to your site.
4. Ignoring Social Media
Ignoring social media is a costly mistake for your business. Great companies take advantage of powerful tools like social media in order to grow. It’s an inexpensive tool given it’s free to create accounts and build your brand awareness.
5. Slow Site
We’ve all found ourselves on a website from one time or another that had poor load speed performance. Chances are if it took longer than four seconds to load we left that site in search for another. One in four visitors will abandon a site that takes longer than 4 seconds to load and 46% of those users will never revisit a site with poor load speed. See just how important and detrimental this can be for your business and reputation? Regularly optimizing your site and checking your speed rating should be made a priority. You can check your site’s speed for free here.
6. No SEO
Not investing in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a huge mistake failed businesses have continuously made. No SEO means you can’t be found online and what’s the purpose of running a business if you can’t be found online? It’s pointless right? Simply investing some left over cash in SEO will also do you no good. You need experts in the field with a strategic strategy in place and you need a solid budget set aside specifically for marketing. 93% of all online experiences begin with a search engine and if you’re not on the first page then you’re out of luck. Keep in mind that your traffic will continue to rise as your costs stay flat. This is an investment into your business that will pay off better than anything else in the long run. Don’t underestimate the power of SEO and its long term investment benefits.
7. No Call To Action
A call to action has been a proven winning strategy and still over 70% of businesses don’t have CTA’s. Great ads with no call to action are useless. This is an opportunity for you to separate yourself from other businesses so take advantage of using CTA’s strategically. Call to actions will help propel your business to reaching its goals.
Avoiding These Marketing Sins
Remember not to ever put all your eggs in one basket. Whether it’s in a single strategy or your SEO strategy as a whole. Algorithms change and this can dramatically hurt your score if you don’t have a strategic plan in place.
If you’re just getting your business started then you are in the perfect position to make sure you make the right decisions to ensure a successful future. If you’re a business owner and see that you are plateauing then invest some time and money into the strategies above. Here at Advent we’re always here to help so don’t hesitate to reach out!