When you’re marketing for a small business, you’re faced with a big challenge: you only have a small margin of error. Small businesses don’t have a lot of resources to play with, so there should be very little room for mistakes.
Whatever advertising or business strategy you come up with, these should be effective in addressing the various goals of the business.
For a small business in England to grow and be competitive, having the right marketing strategies is important as well as seeking professional help from a Birmingham advertising agency and others near you. Otherwise, you may fall behind the competition, hurt your growth potential, and even incur losses. You wouldn’t want this to be the case. On the other hand, when your small business is able to advertise effectively, the potential for growth increases.
For your awareness, here are the common advertising mistakes your small business may be making:
- Relying On The Business Owner Too Much
The marketing team of a small business may tend to assume the business owner knows best. That may be true in a way that the business owner does know the product, what happened in every step of production, packaging, and other matters. But the flaw comes in solely relying on the owner.
Remember that business owners may have a biased view of the product or service because they’re the brains behind the product. So, there has to be a balanced, third-party perspective to offer an objective view.
It’s hard to read the message in the bottle when you’re reading from the inside. You’ve got to remove the note and read it from the outside. The same is true for marketing. If the marketing team wishes to have the best and most honest insights about the products and services they’re promoting, then it’s best to look from the outside—the audience and the target market.
- Not Having A Website
Another common mistake is the notion that it’s fine not to have a website. It’s never alright not to have a site. Especially because you’re still getting your business off the ground, all the more would a website be needed. With today’s emphasis on digital marketing, your business can only keep up when you have a strong digital presence.
So, if you don’t have one, it’s about time for your business to start creating. Here are some of its advantages:
- It enables you to develop a strong online presence;
- It allows faster reception of queries and a timelier resolution to customer concerns;
- It cuts the need for paper advertising;
- It expands your business reach geographically.
- Making Unsubstantiated Claims
Surely, you’ve heard of the common statements in advertising such as ‘Number 1 Supplier!’, ‘The best in town!’, ‘Kills 99.9% of germs,’ or ‘Highest quality at the lowest price,’ among other marketing statements. These aren’t necessarily bad as long as you’re able to substantiate these in your ads.
If you merely use these statements for the sake of doing so and you aren’t able to prove those with facts, then these are claims that don’t hold water. This is a wrong move to make for businesses like yours that are just starting, where you’ve got to focus on building a strong name and credibility. You’ve got to convince your target market you’re a business worth investing in and supporting.
It’s alright to post attractive statements; just be sure you’re able to substantiate these with research and facts.
- Not Tracking Results
How can you determine or measure whether a certain campaign has been effective? You can do this by tracking the results. Analytics now makes it easy for marketers to have insights on certain metrics that’ll help determine whether the marketing tactics are effective.
Tracking the results is important, so you can avoid sticking for a long time with strategies that don’t deliver. Apart from switching to practices that work, you can also focus on the advertising strategies which, as analytics would show, brings in profits and traffic to your small business.
Conclusion
One of the most important aspects of running your small business is marketing. Beyond the fun part of the aesthetics and creativity that come in marketing, it also holds a very significant function: to reach your target customers and to earn profit. However, there’s so much at stake, given you’ve also got to be a lot more practical with your expenses.
There’s only little room for advertising strategies which may only end up as a flop. The list of mistakes above serves as your awareness. If you feel your business is committing some of these, it’s not too late to create changes. You can still switch your marketing campaigns to ensure they’d work for your small business’s goals.
