7 mistakes that will kill your marketing efforts

You have your business started and ready to go, all you need now is a solid advertising campaign to kick things off properly. While it might seem like a simple task, there is a lot more behind it than you might think. In fact, there are loads of mistakes that you can easily make that will end up killing your marketing efforts quickly, and it is essential that you do your best to avoid them. Below, you will find seven of the biggest mistakes, helping you to steer clear of them.

#1 Being Generic with Your Campaign

Mistakes don’t have to be public to be major. In fact, perhaps the worst mistakes you can make are the ones that get you…indifference. The campaigns you shell out thousands, even hundreds of thousands, for, that get almost no results. - Shama Hyder

There is nothing worse than playing it safe and creating a generic marketing campaign – you can rest assured that it will likely kill both your marketing efforts and your business. You might think that appealing to the masses will help you out a lot, as casting a wide net is sure to catch at least a few fish, but you won’t be drawing in the people that you want and need.

Think about your target audience, and about what you want your brand to say to them. You should tailor your campaign to the people that you want to visit your site and do business with you. It might take a little longer when you focus your campaign like this, but the results are well worth it once the customers start flowing in.

#2 Lack of Organisation and Time Management

Not being organised or managing your time correctly can also be your downfall – both in business and marketing. It can be really hard to manage your time efficiently, but with patience, dedication, and good planning, all things are possible. If you are not organised with your marketing campaign, the launch and run are going to be chaos.

Similarly, if you don’t put the time aside to plan it out properly and manage the project, it will not run as smoothly as it could, and you may even find it littered with errors on launch, which can be a nightmare to rectify. When working on time management, you need to break your tasks into chunks, remember that you are only human and have limits, as well as make sure you take things slow and don’t rush.

#3 Not Thinking About the Costs

You have launched your advertisement campaigns across all of the big social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, and you have paid for good reach, but are you keeping track of how much? One of the massive downfalls for most small businesses is that they don’t look at, or keep track of, the amount they are spending on advertising.

Are the outgoing costs less than the incoming results? Are you spending too much on a demographic that has little interest in what you are offering? Could you be spending less with the same results? These are just some of the questions you need to ask yourself when determining if a marketing campaign is working as well as intended.

#4 Changing Too Much

The biggest mistake advertisers make is getting sick of their slogans, their ads, their campaigns. - Eric Rhoads

It can be really tempting to keep changing with the trends, to follow them and adjust your marketing accordingly. The best advice you can take is to resist it, not to go with all of the latest trends, and instead play with the ones that directly relate to your industry. If you keep switching things up to go with the latest viral hashtags and other such trends, you are going to end up changing too much.

This leaves your customers and visitors feeling confused about who you are and the kind of message that your brand is trying to get across. Too much change is not a good thing, because you need to remain consistent in both your advertising and method. Follow some of the trends, but choose them carefully and make sure they tie in nicely with who you are.

#5 Forgetting to be Relatable

Everyone has their own way of talking that forms a part of their personality. This is what makes us human. And for your brand to become more human, it needs a unique voice that fits the overall image it wants to portray. - Shane Barker

There has been plenty of research that shows Gen Z (the generation everyone keeps mistaking for Millennials) prefer to see real people in advertising campaigns than celebrities. This is the generation that has been driving change within the marketing sector, and it is important for companies to start listening to that. You will see more and more businesses using real people that customers can relate to.

This is what people want to see, and it is what will encourage them to buy your products or use your services. It’s not just the people you use; it is your brand as well, you need to be real and relatable to your customers. Not everything you post will be purely business, and there are times when things like compassion and emotion will prove more beneficial than promotion. Deaths and world tragedy should always be approached with empathy and human emotion, never a trace of advertisement.

#6 Giving Up Too Fast

Your marketing campaign might not be a massive success right away, and these things can take time to launch properly. A lot of the time, businesses make the mistake of closing a campaign down way too early, when if they had waited a little longer, they could have gained some valuable leads.

It is important not to give up too quickly, and to persevere even when things seem to be bleak. Every successful business has failures and massive achievements, and you need to discover what works for you, and what needs to be altered.

#7 Not Setting Goals

Goals might seem a little daunting. You might feel that you are setting yourself targets that are too easy, or maybe too hard, but the thing is if you don’t have a goal then you have nothing to work towards – and that can leave you lost and unsure where to go from here.

Even the little ones that don’t feel like much work are valuable to your success, because they provide you with a small milestone that you can work on and then check off when completed. Set yourself easy goals and challenging ones so that you can continue to strive, but also reward yourself regularly for your hard work.

To Conclude

Marketing is not as easy as it first appears, but with the right advice, attitude, and technique, you can build a campaign that is successful and full of all the information your visitors need. As long as you remember these key mistakes that can end up killing your marketing campaign (or even your business) and avoid making them, you are sure to be just fine.