When you’re running a small business and trying to make everything work like it’s supposed to, you often pick up bad habits that can have disastrous consequences in the long-term. Sometimes the mistakes we make with our marketing and business connections are simply the result of trying to save some time and money. It’s a lot cheaper to take a do-it-yourself approach when you’re dealing with clients and trying to attract new ones. There’s nothing wrong with trying to cut costs and take a hands-on approach to your marketing, but there are common mistakes that many small businesses fall victim to every day. Beware of these, and you will be well on your way to launching your successful marketing campaign.
Using Template Responses
If you’re dealing with any number of clients throughout the course of your day, you’re likely writing and replying to a ton of emails. Now, people have been using emails for a while, and a client will be able to spot a template email from a mile away so you really don’t want to be using these. It may save you a lot of time, but could end up costing you clients down the line. You should also have your own email address that’s specific to your site. This is, of course, depending on the size of your business, but if you’re using a generic email account, it looks really unprofessional.
Ignoring Social Media
Most every business has some sort of social media account these days. Whether it’s through Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter, you need to get involved in it. It may not make-or-break your business, but when you start creating networks, you’re exposing yourself to potential clients and advertising that you might not have seen. Most companies of pretty much any size are using links and social media to get attention and keep people aware of what’s going on with their company. If you’re not doing this, it’s the equivalent of not having a phone number or email address. It makes you look out of touch and slow to respond. It’s more of a PR move and is important to show that you’re a adaptable and viable venture.
Giving Your Company A Face
If you’re a smaller company, one of the worst mistakes you can make is by not giving your clients a face to put with the company. The benefit of being a small business is that you’re able to create the personal business relationships that larger companies can’t afford to do. Sometimes it’s as simple as having a video conference or taking your client out to lunch. It might cost a little, but putting it on one of your small business credit cards will be worth it, and, at the same time, you will be building up a client relationship that could lead to others.
Distracting Advertising
As is the case with many online businesses and blogs, one of the best ways to build capital is through online advertising space sold through sites. This is a common strategy, but the approach isn’t often thought all the way through. There are many sites that will crowd their space with banners, pop-ups, and overwhelming advertising that confuses the user. Higher end sites usually stay away from this, but some start-up online businesses often use this type of advertising as a way to make money.
At the beginning, cash flow is tight so many times a site will oversell their ad space. When this happens, you create a poor interface for you current and potential clients. These ads often distract from your core message and can really end up turning people away from your products and services. Overselling ad space ends up making you money in the short-term, but, as far as the long-term is concerned, you end up losing clients.
Parroting The Competition
As a general rule, you always want to be aware of the competition and what they’re doing, especially if they’ve been doing it for a while and their approach has shown itself to work. However, it’s a bad idea when your site or approach too closely resembles your competitor. Ideally, you want to know what’s going on with the competition and look for ways that you can mirror, and then improve upon their approach. You never want to do what the competition is doing, otherwise you’ll confuse your client and just become another company that’s trying to capitalize on someone elses’ success. Look for ways that work and then make them your own. Don’t parrot what someone else is doing.
You may want to do everything yourself, but make sure you’re not making big mistakes that could hurt your company’s longevity. Look into your marketing approach to see what you’re doing right, and more importantly, what you’re doing wrong. You can browse through the web and get tips that could help so you know your DIY approach is the right one.
About the Author: This is a guest post by Jessica Wagner. Jessica is a freelance writer with over 4 years of experience. She has recently been thinking about incorporating her business and researching small business credit cards to get business off the ground.
I guess, ignoring the social media is one of the common mistakes in some business. They don’t realize yet the power of these media to improve their marketing strategies and get more potential source of information and income. Gladly, I’m not ignoring social media, my twitter is on fire now. Love connecting with people.
I think that you have made some decent points here, especially the last point. If you copy the competition, you are constantly playing catch up and aren’t working on your own marketing strategy.
Be unique and let the competition copy you and then you know that people are starting to take notice of what you are doing.
Uniqueness is a great attitude but it is not wrong to get ideas on competitors and improve your ways to get over them. Well,all I know in marketing is that you can’t alone without learning form people who have experiences dealing with effective marketing strategies.
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I have not use social media much to promote my business too, will pay more attention to it in future, thanks for sharing.
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Hmmm! totally agree with you and social media is one of the most important place where you market your product or aware the people about your product and services. I mention here on things also check the reputation on your product on the internet if you fell something published against your product on social media or any other blog then give your reviews and protect your product.
Regards,
Jessey Ellen
All information is of good value. Specially,ignorance of social media is a biggest mistake I think.Thanks for such post.
Social media is one of the most effective ways of today in reaching a business’ target markets. That’s precisely the reason why many businesses are using FB, Twitter and other social media accounts for their own benefit to expand their network. In return, they could actually get greater benefit from it, but of course, they need to commit themselves too.
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Yup in fact I have made this mistakes when I started my marketing career but later on learned not to made these mistakes again.
Social media plays a vital role and have an impact on our business through one way or the other. Social media is not only about socializing and interacting with friends. The way we market our products and services with the help of social media is a complete new experience. We cannot think about traditional marketing when social media can help us in such a great way.
That was really gold mine article. Seo have been a part of the online media community and utilizing one would mean a great margin for blog/site efficiency. Learn from others mistakes and develop a strategy to combat and avoid any of that. Must share post.
There comes a point in any internet marketer’s career where things just get too busy to do everything alone. When this happens it should mean that you’re making money online and you’re doing well. Also it’ll mean that you need to delegate some of your tasks to others. This will definitely include outsourcing your content creation to an article ghost writer. There are quite a few advantages to this.
I would say that many small businesses do not take Social Media seriously, nowadays even big brands like Adidas, Nike etc display their FB page on TV/Hoarding ads.
Social media is one of the best way to introduce yourself and your business and I do agree that once you’ve expose your business you are relating to your future clients that is why these businesses should build a very strong relationship using these social medias for their clients. We should take social media a serious way to expand and expose our business.
Social media will help with the promotion and exposure of your business. It is profitable for your business when people from your industry feel your presence.