The 5 Most Common Mistakes Clients Make in Marketing

1. They don’t have a marketing strategy

And that’s why they do “impulsive” marketing. They jump from one social network to another, they think their customers are everyone, they try to ride the wave of passing trends and they don’t have a unified textual and visual communication.

A marketing strategy is the foundation of effective marketing. It is a document that clearly defines your brand in every aspect, from visual and written communication to your ideal customer and the choice of appropriate marketing channels.

Without a good strategy, you’re just another dark fish in a school of thousands. A marketing strategy will help you and you will no longer be the same easily replaceable fish that no one notices.

The strategy will differentiate you from your competitors and determine what you should communicate in your campaigns to engage your (potential) customers, increase sales or build a strong brand. It will keep you on the right path to your goals and won’t let you stray.

For your customers, you simply become a recognisable brand with unique benefits and features.

2. The agency’s bold ideas make them afraid

And they’d rather choose a conservative idea. They are afraid of how the client will react if they take a clear stand, if they stand up for their qualities and benefits and present them in the same way to the outside world.

This wouldn’t be a problem if we weren’t in the world of marketing, whose job it is to captivate (potential) customers to such an extent that they remember our brand for a future purchase or make an immediate purchase. This is especially true in today’s competitive environment, where supply often exceeds demand. Bold ideas give us the opportunity to effectively differentiate ourselves from competing brands.

There are a lot of conservative campaigns in the market that don’t ‘shout’ too much, don’t offend anyone, don’t get talked about and eventually bite the dust. And you don’t want to be one of those brands condemned to oblivion, do you?

Don’t be afraid of a bold idea. Yes, it won’t be popular with everyone, but your customers aren’t ‘everyone’. You just need to appeal to the right customers, i.e. your target audience.

3. You don’t have enough marketing budget

As a result, any marketing activity is significantly underfunded and, of course, cannot deliver the desired results. In practice, this means If you have a total monthly budget of €400 for a Google PPC campaign, you can’t expect the same results as a brand that invests €3,000 per month in this activity.

If €3,000 brings in €10,000 for your competitor, it would be naive to think that our €400 will bring in the same amount. Maybe it will be €1,000 or €2,000, but most likely it will not be €10,000. However, we cannot say that this is a failure of the campaign and a marketing error, but a failure of the budget allocated.

If you invest ‘not enough’ in marketing, it is very likely that the return on investment will not be great. It is simply impossible to outperform on a small budget in today’s highly competitive environment. We will never outperform brands that are willing to invest more in marketing than we are. These are the laws of both mathematics and marketing, and unfortunately no one is going to do anything about it.

On the other hand, the bigger the marketing budget, the greater the chance that the return on investment will be greater.

4. You’re not committed to long-term, consistent marketing

Only long-term and consistent marketing will deliver the greatest return on investment in the long run. If you already have a marketing strategy, stick to it and don’t deviate from it after a few months. Long-term results usually take a few years.

If you stop sticking to your strategy and go back to ‘impulsive’ marketing, you have essentially wasted your marketing investment to date and are unlikely to get the results you expected.

So be patient if you don’t see results right away. Trust your marketing strategy and continue with long-term, consistent marketing. You will find that your efforts will yield the desired results.

5. They fail to build a brand or rush to recoup their investment

Companies are often reluctant to invest in something that doesn’t deliver immediate results (conversions). It takes years to build a strong brand and unfortunately the return on investment is negligible in the short term (a few months).

This simple fact is the reason why clients start to worry about their investment and pull out, mistakenly thinking that if they don’t see a return, the fault is automatically on the marketing side and they need to do things differently. The problem is a misunderstanding of the purpose of branding.

Companies want to see quick results, and if they have a small marketing budget on top of that, it takes much longer to build a strong brand and get a return on investment than it does for companies with large budgets, which makes them even more frustrated.

Our advice to you is:

Build your brand for the long term, persevere with consistent marketing and don’t let up if you don’t see immediate results. Within a few years, you’ll get to the point where your brand is the one that drives your sales, and you won’t have to constantly rely on acquisition (sales) campaigns whose (lack of) success is largely related to the amount of money invested.

Conclusion

The best thing you can do in the world of business and marketing is to learn from the mistakes of others. Do you want to create marketing that delivers long-term results? Then make sure you avoid the 5 most common mistakes we’ve discussed in this article. You’ll save yourself from unmet expectations and disappointment, and you won’t waste a lot of money.