With the constantly evolving digital marketing landscape, knowing where to best spend your resources can be a daunting task.
Here at Soulpepper, we’re committed to helping small businesses thrive. Through helping hundreds of small businesses, we’ve found some common mistakes we see often being made with their marketing tactics.
Once you know about these common mistakes, they can be easily avoided. So without further ado, here are 7 common mistakes small businesses make:
Not Spending Enough Time on Marketing
Building a marketing campaign that brings in qualified leads to your business is difficult and needs a time devotion of more than just a couple hours per week.
If you really want to be at the top of your industry, allocating more time to craft your marketing goals and plan per month is key.
Spending Too Little or Too Much Money on Marketing
It is easy to underfund your marketing spend for your business, especially when social media sites like Facebook & Instagram promise that with less than $10 you can start advertising.
Yes, you can start advertising with a small sum of money, but your results will be lackluster, to say the least.
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Overspending on marketing can be detrimental too. Often this happens when a business is trying to promote themselves to a large audience. With no specified target audience and a generic ad copy, your marketing budget can disappear pretty quickly. If you are spending lots of money and getting very low engagement rates, you might want to re-evaluate the campaign you’re running.
Targeting the Wrong Audience
The amazing thing about digital marketing is that we’re able to target a very specific group of people. As opposed to traditional marketing, where ads showing up on TV or radio are usually shown in front of a large unspecified group of people.
With the power of data, digital marketers are able to place the right products in front of willing buyers. Social media sites allow the ad creator to select users based on their location, interests, behaviors, and even association with your competition. It is rare to find an ad being targeting at someone who is not interested. Unless of course, the ad creator improperly selected their audience.
Not doing A|B Tests
A|B Testing is when you create two slightly different versions of the same ad. Say, for example, you change the title between ad A and ad B. A lot of social media advertising sites make it really easy for ad creators to create A|B tests for ads. These tests will help you determine what type of messaging or images work the best with the audience you’re trying to target and give you very valuable insights on how you should craft your brands messaging in the future.
Not Optimizing for Mobile
We cannot emphasize this enough: mobile optimization is a necessity in today’s modern landscape. With more and more studies showing how users are reaching business websites via a mobile device, having a mobile-optimized website is the key to keeping users around.
Mobile usage is more prominent than desktop usage and it is important businesses have a mobile-friendly website for users to go to. Or else, users might just end up with your competitors.
Not Tracking Your Results
If you aren’t going back after your marketing campaign ends and seeing what ends and what doesn’t, how are you supposed to improve? There are a lot of data tracking tools you can use to see what your users are doing once they click on your ad or enter your website.
We recommend you utilize Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, and ensure you have the appropriate tagging set up for your advertising platform (such as the gtag for Google or the Facebook Pixel).
Using the data gathered from these tools, you can accurately and effectively plan for the next iteration of your marketing campaign. Meaning, you can lower your costs and increase your engagements by learning what works and what doesn’t.
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