Avoid These Mistakes in Your Marketing Strategy

By Lauren White, RCS Reporter.

What NOT to do if you want your company’s marketing to dominate.

In today’s media-driven world, effective marketing is crucial.  Marketing helps spread the word about your business, services, and what you stand for.  Now more than ever, it’s important for a company’s marketing to help them stand out from the crowd.  LEVERAGE is an award-winning digital marketing agency that partners with brands and helps them become an authority, or leader, in their select markets.  

Jay Taylor, the Founder and Managing Director at LEVERAGE, sees business owners and marketing departments make the same mistakes time and time again.  So, he wrote about the five key mistakes for a company to avoid in its marketing strategy.

The first mistake Jay identifies is focusing on tactics instead of establishing a strategy.  Companies should determine their overall strategy that meets their predetermined goals, then decide the tactics that will help them achieve those goals. 

Not establishing goals is the second mistake Jay sees companies make.  It’s important to put the wants and needs of your customers before your own.  For example, Jay suggests asking yourself, “Do you want a new website to make yourself feel better about your brand, or do you want a new website that caters to the wants and needs of your customers?”  Examples of goals include increased brand awareness, in-store traffic, or lead generation.

The third mistake is “neglecting to define and track the proper KPIs,” according to Jay.  KPIs, also known as key performance indicators, are specific metrics a company tracks to determine their progress towards a particular goal.  A few examples of other KPIs include sales revenue, cost per lead, and landing page conversion rates.  Without KPIs, it’s difficult to determine if the strategy is successful or not. 

Fourth, companies should avoid “targeting too broad of an audience.”  Customer personas are more effective than defining a target audience. “The reason for this is that it’s much easier to create a strategy and message that resonates with a persona than a broad target audience,” Jay explains.

Forgetting prospects at the top of the marketing funnel is the fifth, and final, most common mistake.  In marketing, companies cast a wide net to capture as many leads as possible. These leads then funnel through six different phases before they become a customer and are ready to make a purchase.  The phases of the funnel are: awareness, interest, consideration, intent, evaluation, purchase.  Since many companies target bottom-of-funnel prospects who are ready to make a purchasing decision, there is a great opportunity to market to top-of-funnel prospects and capture them early in the sales cycle with limited competition

Any company can develop a solid and effective marketing strategy by avoiding these common mistakes.  

Read the full article, to get clear examples and suggestions that can help a company jumpstart their marketing strategy and set them up for success.

Learn more about LEVERAGE.