20 Biggest New Marketing Mistakes
When an entrerpreneur, business person, or new marketer starts marketing, there are definitely some common naive mistakes one would do well to avoid. Are you going to fall victim to the most common, biggest marketing mistakes?
Let's learn what they are and how to avoid them. After all, the success of your job and maybe even your company is depending on you.
Mistake #1: No identified customer pain point.
Marketing's job is to deliver and communicate value to the customer. How do you know what value is? As the founder of Sun Microsystems, Vinod Khosla, famously says:
"Every big problem is a big opportunity. If you don't have a big problem, you don't have a big opportunity. Nobody will pay you to solve a non-problem."
Mistake #2: No one clearly repeated logical solution.
IMC. 9 times.
Mistake #3: A sleepy solution. Does your target yawn or turn away when you share your solution?
You need a purple cow.
Mistake #4: Thinking low price matters.
Mistake #5: Thinking marketing is the same thing as advertising.
Mistake #6: Not selling.
Mistake #7: Thinking marketing is evil. Or, becoming evil yourself because you're "in marketing." Old marketing is evil. Hard-sales paradigms are irritating and ineffective. Win-lose relationships all utimately end up as lose-lose.
A good marketer knows that marketing is the long-term process of inviting new friends into a customer community or tribe, engaging with them, solving their problems (i.e., creating value), and thanking them for being a loyal friend.
Mistake #8: Over-empahsis on acquistion in lieu of retention and thanking.
Mistake #9: Selling by telling, not by listening.
Mistake #10: No early internal stakeholder buy-in.
Mistake #11: No clear goal.
You can either pick an awareness, acquistion, retention, or viral goal. "All of the above" is not an acceptable choice.
Mistake #12: No measures and no measurable objectives. If you're not measuring it, you're not winning it. What is your marketing ROI? What's your estimate of $spent/$made? (Hint: if your "$spend to $made" ratio is more than 1, you lose.) Did you make a budget for what you want to do? Did you predict what revenue the campaign might bring in within a specified period of months? Did you turn your overall marketing goal into a few measurable objectives (i.e., acquire 25 new customers in the next 2 weeks)?
If so, congratulations: You're in the top 80% of all marketers. So now what? Did you spend approximately what you budgeted? Did revenue approximate about what you predicted? Did you achieve the measurable objective? No? Well then, "Lucy, you have some 'splainin' to do." Do a full lessons learned post-mortem and pivot.
Mistake #13: No one person's name "owns" the task.
Mistake #14: Not listening to customers Everywhere.
If you call up a customer for a testimonial but don't troll the blogophere or Google "customer complaints" for your company, you are enjoying your own selective perception of reality. Set up a Google alert; troll Twitter, target market forums, and Facebook; and dig a little deeper.
Mistake #15: Okay - this one is not fair because it is really hard even for very experienced, great marketers to do: You can't figure out if new sales (or no sales) are due to a certain marketing campaign or effort or due to something else.
Can we say, "extraneous, confounding variables?" They are everywhere in the real world. Marketing does not exist in a sterile lab. The real world is messy, non-linear, chaotically fast-changing, dynamic. Good luck measuring your control variables to hold them constant or even knowing what they might be.
Mistake #16: No understanding of customer lifecycle (not only their buying cycle) and triggers, schedules, events, and touch-points.
Mistake #17: Telling the product information, not reflecting the customer's emotional need. And not responding with reassurance to the customer's changing trust levels over the long-haul.
Mistake #18: No early customer-stakeholder buy-in.
Co-create. Let the tribe build it. Crowd-design it with your customer community or even just a similar demographic to your target market.
Mistake #19: Not targeting. You have a new product to market or you have an old product that needs to be revived. Are you really going to market to everybody? Really? Why? "Because we're awesome" is not an acceptable answer.
When you market to "everybody" you wind up marketing to nobody. Our society is more fractionalized than ever before, not less. Your marketing will have much more power if you define all of the customers you are not serving -- and let it be most of the market. Polarize: be on the same side of your chosen demographic segment and against everything they are against. You will literally either niche or die because the way to get across the valley of death of no sales is to "bowl down the first bowling pin." W
Mistake #20: Not recognizing that the medium is the message.
A marketer's job is to be the voice of the customer in the company. You're the customer advocate. It's your job to gently remind everyone in the company that the sole purpose of the company is to please the customer. You need to patiently shift all-to common vestiges of the production, sales, and managerial mind-sets away from "what we make, what have we sold, and what are our people doing" to what pleases the customer. In lean thinking, whatever is not directly delivering value to the customer is waste.
When an entrerpreneur, business person, or new marketer starts marketing, there are definitely some common naive mistakes one would do well to avoid. Are you going to fall victim to the most common, biggest marketing mistakes?
Let's learn what they are and how to avoid them. After all, the success of your job and maybe even your company is depending on you.
Mistake #1: No identified customer pain point.
Marketing's job is to deliver and communicate value to the customer. How do you know what value is? As the founder of Sun Microsystems, Vinod Khosla, famously says:
"Every big problem is a big opportunity. If you don't have a big problem, you don't have a big opportunity. Nobody will pay you to solve a non-problem."
Mistake #2: No one clearly repeated logical solution.
IMC. 9 times.
Mistake #3: A sleepy solution. Does your target yawn or turn away when you share your solution?
You need a purple cow.
Mistake #4: Thinking low price matters.
Mistake #5: Thinking marketing is the same thing as advertising.
Mistake #6: Not selling.
Mistake #7: Thinking marketing is evil. Or, becoming evil yourself because you're "in marketing." Old marketing is evil. Hard-sales paradigms are irritating and ineffective. Win-lose relationships all utimately end up as lose-lose.
A good marketer knows that marketing is the long-term process of inviting new friends into a customer community or tribe, engaging with them, solving their problems (i.e., creating value), and thanking them for being a loyal friend.
Mistake #8: Over-empahsis on acquistion in lieu of retention and thanking.
Mistake #9: Selling by telling, not by listening.
Mistake #10: No early internal stakeholder buy-in.
Mistake #11: No clear goal.
You can either pick an awareness, acquistion, retention, or viral goal. "All of the above" is not an acceptable choice.
Mistake #12: No measures and no measurable objectives. If you're not measuring it, you're not winning it. What is your marketing ROI? What's your estimate of $spent/$made? (Hint: if your "$spend to $made" ratio is more than 1, you lose.) Did you make a budget for what you want to do? Did you predict what revenue the campaign might bring in within a specified period of months? Did you turn your overall marketing goal into a few measurable objectives (i.e., acquire 25 new customers in the next 2 weeks)?
If so, congratulations: You're in the top 80% of all marketers. So now what? Did you spend approximately what you budgeted? Did revenue approximate about what you predicted? Did you achieve the measurable objective? No? Well then, "Lucy, you have some 'splainin' to do." Do a full lessons learned post-mortem and pivot.
Mistake #13: No one person's name "owns" the task.
Mistake #14: Not listening to customers Everywhere.
If you call up a customer for a testimonial but don't troll the blogophere or Google "customer complaints" for your company, you are enjoying your own selective perception of reality. Set up a Google alert; troll Twitter, target market forums, and Facebook; and dig a little deeper.
Mistake #15: Okay - this one is not fair because it is really hard even for very experienced, great marketers to do: You can't figure out if new sales (or no sales) are due to a certain marketing campaign or effort or due to something else.
Can we say, "extraneous, confounding variables?" They are everywhere in the real world. Marketing does not exist in a sterile lab. The real world is messy, non-linear, chaotically fast-changing, dynamic. Good luck measuring your control variables to hold them constant or even knowing what they might be.
Mistake #16: No understanding of customer lifecycle (not only their buying cycle) and triggers, schedules, events, and touch-points.
Mistake #17: Telling the product information, not reflecting the customer's emotional need. And not responding with reassurance to the customer's changing trust levels over the long-haul.
Mistake #18: No early customer-stakeholder buy-in.
Co-create. Let the tribe build it. Crowd-design it with your customer community or even just a similar demographic to your target market.
Mistake #19: Not targeting. You have a new product to market or you have an old product that needs to be revived. Are you really going to market to everybody? Really? Why? "Because we're awesome" is not an acceptable answer.
When you market to "everybody" you wind up marketing to nobody. Our society is more fractionalized than ever before, not less. Your marketing will have much more power if you define all of the customers you are not serving -- and let it be most of the market. Polarize: be on the same side of your chosen demographic segment and against everything they are against. You will literally either niche or die because the way to get across the valley of death of no sales is to "bowl down the first bowling pin." W
Mistake #20: Not recognizing that the medium is the message.
A marketer's job is to be the voice of the customer in the company. You're the customer advocate. It's your job to gently remind everyone in the company that the sole purpose of the company is to please the customer. You need to patiently shift all-to common vestiges of the production, sales, and managerial mind-sets away from "what we make, what have we sold, and what are our people doing" to what pleases the customer. In lean thinking, whatever is not directly delivering value to the customer is waste.
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