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DohMany entrepreneurs start marketing, become disappointed with the results, and stop.

Then they get desperate and start again … and stop again.

This cycle of marketing failure can be broken. With a little attention—and possibly some help and guidance—any business can be amazing at marketing.

To begin with, entrepreneurs should stop making these five common mistakes.

1. Thinking it’s about you.

Does your marketing focus all on you, your product, or your service? The hard truth is that your prospects don’t care about you at all. 

Humans are self-interested, and we hear a lot of messages. If they aren’t about us, we just move on.

The more you talk about you in your marketing, the less you’re talking about prospects’ pains, problems, needs, and desires—making it doubtful that you’ll capture their interest. 

2. No call to action.

When you don’t use a call to action, prospects won’t know what to do with the information you’ve given them and are likely to move on—with all the hard work you’ve done to get their attention going for naught.

Remember, if you don’t take the initiative to help customers start the buying process, they probably won’t.

3. Targeting everyone.

Everything to everyone is nothing to anyone. You don’t want to be nothing to anyone.

More often than not, when businesses try to market to everyone, it’s because they don’t understand their particular niche.

Your niche is the people who really want and need your stuff and for whom the alternatives don’t really work. These are the prospects you should target.

4. Forgetting about customers.

Not only can you market to existing customers, you should.  They already love you. They already understand your special sauce.

This makes them a prime target to buy something else—they just need to be reminded every now and then.

5. Not measuring.

Entrepreneurs will pay to build a website, buy Google AdWords, or advertise. They pay over and over again, but when we ask them how much traffic, how many leads, and how many customers those activities created … well, the silence is deafening.

At some point, you need to decide if it’s worth doing something again.

The Bottom Line

If you don’t want to be part of the 95% of entrepreneurs who make these mistakes, there’s nothing stopping you. They call all be fixed with a little knowledge, attention, and effort.

 

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Image courtesy of hobvias sudoneighm, Creative Commons.

Topics: tips, strategy, measurement, b2b marketing