by Lina Martinez

Image Pixabay CC0 License

As a small business owner, you likely embark on marketing activities to give your business a boost. Marketing is one aspect of running a business that many entrepreneurs dread. For starters, marketing is a time-consuming task, and in a small business, it can be hard to find the hours to dedicate to marketing. Secondly, marketing often seems like a vague concept; a lot of people think they understand how to do it, but become frustrated when their efforts don’t achieve the desired results. 

Many common mistakes are made by businesses when attempting to promote their business. At best, these mistakes can mean that a lot of time, money and effort spent working on the campaign is wasted. At worst, the marketing campaign can be so ill-judged that it harms the business. Both of these are situations that you want to avoid. Read on to find out if you are making some of these common marketing mistakes so that you can remedy the situation and achieve greater success from your campaigns. Don't forget to also tap into the resources made available to you with your marketing. For instance, you might want to hire a freelance hubspot consultant to help with your business growth in a strategic and lucrative way. You can attempt marketing yourself, but these experts are experts for a reason.

Lacking a Clear Objective

Before you throw lots of money at your latest promotional method, make sure that you stop and ask yourself what you want to achieve. Without a clear objective, you will have no way of knowing how successful the campaign is, or if you are using the right tools for the job. 

You will need a definite marketing plan for your activities, which will highlight your aims, planned marketing activities and timescales. As with all business goals, your marketing objectives should also be SMART - specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely.

Examples of marketing objectives include aims such as; raising awareness of your brand, promoting a new product range, increasing subscribers to your email list, etc. Once you have decided on your objective, you can plan how best to achieve the desired results, along with how you are going to measure the success of the campaign.

Failure to Reach Target Audience

Knowledge is a powerful tool in business marketing. To understand how to reach your market, you need to identify your target audience, and the best ways to reach them. Target markets vary widely between industries; in turn, the methods used to reach them also varies. A company that sells industrial cleaning products will use very different marketing methods compared to marketing for attorneys and law firms. Therefore, it is vital to understand which promotion methods are best suited to your specific industry.

Missing a Call to Action

Once you have identified who you are targeting with your campaign, and what you want to achieve from it, you need to make sure that you include a strong call to action. 
The call to action describes the prompt that you will give to encourage the audience to respond to your campaign. This could mean that you want them to buy the product now, or maybe you want them to subscribe to your email list. Whatever your call to action is, you will need to include it in your campaign.