4 Common Marketing Mistakes – Are You Guilty?

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With the countless marketing techniques available to businesses today, many teams have moved away from core tactics and taken the leap into unfamiliar territory. It is important to always remain consistent to your original mission as a business. There is no shame in adapting your delivery to reach a new audience but it should never come at the cost of your establish brand message.

Another extremely common mistake is forgetting to take into account the nuances of the selected marketing channel or worse, the audience. Marketing takes time and effort, [Tweet “There is no substitute for effort in marketing, digital OR traditional.”] It is important to analyze your target demographic and adjust your message to their interests/needs. It is equally important to recognize the platform that will showcase your message; every marketing channel has it’s own community that brands must adapt to.  My hope is to provide some examples of what NOT to do in marketing.

What Marketing Mistakes Are You Making?

1. Automated Cross-Posting

Here we see a tweet from a new age gifts store promoting their new product. The problem is, the text cuts off and we’re left with a link to Facebook. But it’s easy to click and see, right? Sure but how many people are willing to go through the trouble? They’re on Twitter for a reason. When you connect accounts across networks you ignore the preference of the users, it even breaks up the natural flow of reading on the chosen network. Some of the more savvy users will also see these posts as lazy and almost spammy. If you’re not willing to post directly to the site in question, how likely is it that you’ll be present to provide a response?

So what could they have done better?

This tweet does a few things right, first they’ve uploaded an image of the product directly to Twitter, allowing users to see the product without leaving their timeline. They’ve also included a url to view (and possibly) purchase the t-shirt directly, they’ve made it easy on users and easy usually leads to better conversion rate.

2. “Birdy Bragging” – Gary Vaynerchuk

This is a habit that is becoming all too prevalent on Twitter. It’s simple, brands (or even people), retweeting every comment/compliment/mention that they see in their notifications. You might think you’re leveraging customers for free promotion but really, you’re bragging. What value does this provide to your followers? They already follow you, they’re probably interested, they may even like you! When you constantly retweet positive comments, you’ve added nothing to the conversation.

But I Want to Share Testimonials!

This is not to say there isn’t a right time for sharing occasional praise, just got about it differently. Take HostGator for example: They are a popular web hosting company (we do all of our hosting with them) that found a creative way to share feedback, on Pinterest! They have an entire board dedicated to nicely crafted testimonials. They have the board clearly labeled so users are able to choose to view them!

3. Turn Your Timeline Into A Menu

Many businesses look at social media marketing as a new place to blast our constant product information, this is simply not the cast. This habit ignores the first and most important word “social”. Proper social media marketing is about conversation, engagement and personality. When customers simply want to find your menu, your products or a list of your services they can visit your website. When they find you on Facebook, Twitter or other social networks they’re looking for context, information and often times answers. If a brand fills it’s entire feed with non-engaging product information people will lose interest. When users stop interacting your reach drops and worse, people may choose to ignore you all together. 

What Should I Do Instead?

Find content that is relevant to your industry, talk about local events or news that your customers may find interesting. When you provide value and entertain, customers are significantly more likely to pay attention. Once you have demonstrated value to potential customers you can, creatively, promote your products and services.

Post by Dove.

4. Create Extra Work For Customers

Many of you have seen the value in social media marketing and have taken the time to join the relevant networks. So the obvious next step is to add these network logos to all of our marketing material, right?

Sunglasses Billboard With Facebook Logo

What Did They Do Wrong?

This billboard might seem like a good idea. They chose an eye-catching photo, good contrast and readability in the text, the brand name is clearly visible and the even added the url to the website and social logos. The problem is, they’ve left the work up to the user. How do we know where to find them on Facebook or Youtube? So now, a user must go home, remember the brand and log on Facebook to find the correct page.

Once they load up Facebook they realize they have 3 notifications and 2 new messages, once they answer their messages and ‘like’ the photo of their niece they find some interesting posts in their timeline…. Get where I’m going here? By the time they are ready to search they’ve forgotten why they were on Facebook in the first place and thus, a potential user is lost. If you’re going to push people to your social profiles make it easy! Include the full URL so anybody can go directly to your brand page.

Marketing Is About People, Not Products

Many of these mistakes can be easily corrected by re-evaluating your overall marketing strategy. At it’s simplest form, marketing is about creating an emotional connection with your audience. Research about your target demographic will provide insight into the interest and habits of your potential customers. Once you have established that, put the time and effort into properly communicating your message to the appropriate channels.

Queen City Media specializes in this type of research and execution, please contact us today if you would like a FREE marketing evaluation.

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