Marketing Mistakes That Drive Us Mad

March Madness is upon us, but it’s not the basketball tournament that's been driving us crazy this month. We all have pet peeves, and we can all relate to the feeling when these pet peeves are peaked. Of course, for us, many of those pet peeves are marketing-related. Whether you're the business owner, marketing director, or social media manager, you have a lot of responsibilities and things to keep in mind. Due to the knowledge, time, and money that it takes, it can be difficult, and it can be easy to make mistakes.

To avoid driving yourself mad over marketing, we've created a list of common marketing mistakes that drive us mad. Don't worry, we've also included advice on how to avoid them. Check them out below!

Trying to Sell to Everyone

We get it, you want as many customers as possible. There is nothing wrong with this, but the mistake small businesses make is they often consider everyone as their target audience. However, you might end up selling to no one at all by attempting to sell to everyone.

A defined target audience allows you to focus your marketing efforts on a specific group of people whose problems your products or services can solve.

Being Too Wordy

"Use the first word that comes to your mind, if it is appropriate and colorful."- Stephen King

We tend to agree with Stephen King on this one. Adding filler words can confuse or even bore the reader. Limit the adverbs and adjectives you're using, especially when writing social media copy. A poor adjective can weaken your writing because it doesn't add anything to the description. Do not try to strengthen weak adjectives by adding words like ‘so’, ‘‘really, and ‘very’. Instead, replace them with a better adjective or a noun.



Graphic Overload on Social Media

Social media users love good visual content. With so much content floating around, it's important to create a strong visual strategy for your business. While text can be a great tool for communicating information, it’s not easy on the eyes. Too much text can be visually overwhelming. In fact, photos and videos outperform purely text-based posts across nearly all online platforms. If you work in a primarily text-based industry, you can still use visual content in marketing by laying limited text over a photo or video, but remember, less is more when it comes to adding text to your photos or videos.

Abusing Social Media

A common small business marketing mistake is to abuse social media by treating it as a platform for hard sales marketing. Have you ever purchased a product from a sales-heavy social media post or website? Probably not, and neither have most people. Rather than trying to sell with every post, small businesses should use social media to create brand awareness and interact with their customers in a non-sales capacity. Your social media should highlight aspects of your business, such as employee milestones, behind the scene looks, and be a place where your audience can engage with you, rather than being sold to 24/7. Of course, including a call to action as part of an engaging post isn’t a problem. However, your primary goal for social media shouldn’t be sales.

Do you find your business making some of these same mistakes? Then click the link below to get in touch with us today!