21 Top Marketing Mistakes Small Business Owners Make | Bids By Pros 3
In previous posts we discussed the importance of marketing and its direct relation with every business. Lets continue discovering more marketing mistakes small business owners make.
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9- Think of marketing in a closed box:
Each business is unique to itself. Even if the business offers a same product as the business few streets down the road, the two are still unique and different in many ways. The biggest mistake small business owners make is to follow other business footsteps. What has worked for the others might not be a good marketing strategy for your business. Marketing and its strategies should not have any limitation. Think of marketing out side of the box and do not limit the marketing strategies to a cliché approach others do and be creative.
10- Don’t know what marketing plans to set:
Everyone is familiar with the word marketing. The first conversation when opening a new enterprise is “Lets do marketing!” But do we all really realize the core meaning of the marketing? I compare marketing strategies and its unique approach to our fingerprints, which is unique for each human. Many understand the word “marketing” and the importance of it but are not familiar with how to set the strategy and the game planning related to their own branch of business.
It is yet a mistake knowing the importance of marketing but not being aware how to set the strategies. So they procrastinate setting marketing plans. Since setting the marketing plan requires research, analysis and knowledge of he market, hire a professional researcher and marketer to create a game plan is necessary. To hire a skilled researcher in marketing field, post your need in bids by pros project format and share with friends to get the best recommendation.
11- Assuming the product or service will sell itself:
One of the biggest marketing mistakes is to assume your product or service is going to sell itself without any marketing strategies. This assumption is misleadingly translating marketing into advertisement. I have encountered many small business owners who declared that quote-to-quote “I don’t spend money on the marketing, to me I only rely on word of mouth”.
“Word Of Mouth” is the strongest way of marketing. So what this small business owner was under impression that he does not do any marketing because he thought marketing was spending money on advertisement. So in reality he was counting on the most effective marketing, the word of mouth. To attract word of mouth two factors involve:
A) Product or service:
People have to like the product or service to continue talk about it and refer their friends.
B) Customer service
Another major difference between each business is the level of customer service. I didn’t say the level of good or bad. What I mean is each business owner or employee that has been fully trained to look after a client as a customer service has his or her own charm. This specific charisma and character of each personnel make the business unique to others and is a major factor for word of mouth.
Let me give you an example of how powerful the word of mouth and spreading the word is to any business. While ago I worked as a junior manager in an up-scale restaurant. The general manager identified his target niche as young professionals in downtown. So he asked few of his employees who were the same age range and had the same destination to get home to use public transportation and talk about his restaurant among each other. His decision, although was not directly traceable, but yet had an amazing effect. Since he had every client write a comment card, in there the main question was “How you hear about us?” and many without any surprise responded via word of mouth.
To wrap up the marketing mistake #11, even if the business owner is avoiding any advertisement expense, they still rely on spread of word about their service and product via the community and the word of mouth marketing.
12- Don’t know their target audience:
To plan and set a marketing strategy, any small business has to have a direct target and niche as an audience. When knowing whom the audience is one must analyze everything about their niche audience. The list certainly is not limited to the audience’s income, age, interest ratio to the product, sex, background and race, commitment ratio and their loyalty.
It is yet another mistake not to recognize the target niche audience since without it no marketing strategy exist.
13- Don’t know your competition:
The best way to analyze the market is to get familiar with your competition and rivals. It might sound cliché but as the God Father movie suggested, “Keep you enemy close“. Or if I may rephrase ” Keep your competition close and be aware of their moves”.
This is especially important for small business owners in small community to have a good relationship with other competition. To share my experience, the same restaurant general manager I used to be his junior manager, always encouraged me to go to other local restaurant and dine. He even offered to pay the bill. All I had to do is to analyze everything from the greeting, staff knowledge, manager’s presence, client’s relation and the last impression. My report helped him to understand his competition strengths and weaknesses and adjust his marketing strategy according to this fact.
Summarize:
A business owner who is fully knowledgeable about his company, product or service and the detail analysis of its target niche audience, set and plans its marketing strategies based on the uniqueness of its business offering and thinks outside the box. To do so he must be aware of the competition and niche market and never assume the product or service will sell for itself.
Keep reading, as the next article covering the marketing mistakes small business owners make will continue.
Comment box is open for your opinion and be kind to share with friends.
Don Z
www.bidsbypros.com