The fireworks are over, the hangovers have (hopefully) cleared, new years resolutions have been set, and you're back in the office.
So now what?
January is a chance to start fresh, and is often a time of introspecting. Thinking about where you are now, and where you want to go. If you're like many business owners and marketers, you are mulling over where you want both your career and business to be a year from now, and are carefully considering what it will take to get from now to then. In today's post I share 5 marketing mistakes to avoid in the year ahead, to maximise the chances of achieving your goals.
1) Always Talking About The Features
Your prospects don't care about your product or service's features. They want to know how you can help them solve a problem they have. Focus your marketing efforts on solving customer problems, and you'll be rewarded. This holds true whether you are writing a blog post, or designing a flyer. Save feature discussions for later in the buying process, when a customer is actively considering your product or service. If you are going to talk features, please don't list off hundreds of features for the sake of it with no context. Always explain how the features of your product or service help your customers to solve their problems.
2) Not Measuring Your Return On Investment
"I know that half of my advertising dollars are wasted … I just don’t know which half." is a famous quote from John Wanamaker, and it reflects on a problem many businesses have with their marketing efforts. If you want to improve your marketing results in the year ahead, one of the best ways to do it is to improve the way you measure results. Focus on strategies which are measurable. The internet and tools like HubSpot have made it possible to monitor your marketing much more closely. There's no excuse for not knowing which of your website traffic sources are profitable anymore.
3) Silo'ing Individual Marketing Tactics
The best marketers understand that all marketing channels work together. Everything needs to be co-ordinated, and treated as one. The days of having one team or person managing your search engine optimisation, another managing your pay per click campaigns and another producing print material independently are over. Your team needs to work together to develop strategies and ideas that incorporate multiple channels. Treating channels as individual silos is only going to cost you in the year ahead.
4) Focusing On Quantity, Not Quality
Quantity is important, don't get me wrong, but it should not be at the cost of quality. It's no good religiously writing 2 blog posts a day if they're terrible. Spend time working on your company's marketing material, and ensure that every piece of material you produce is great.
5) Not Having A Strategy
Spend some time creating a strategy. I don't mean a rigid plan which says "we are going to write 3 emails in September 2022", but a dynamic strategy for the year ahead. Make sure that you understand your buyer personas, set achievable goals, choose which marketing methods you are going to use and how you are going to budget. Once you have set your strategy, stick to it. Don't change the marketing methods you use every month, or constantly chase the newest thing. Review your progress against your goals regularly. The only thing worse than not having a strategy is spending time developing one and putting it away in a filing cabinet, only to be reviewed a year ahead.
So there we have it. 5 B2B marketing mistakes to avoid this year. Do you have some of your own to share? Discuss them in the comments below!
