4 Common Marketing Mistakes Small Businesses Make

Breaking into the entrepreneurial world is quite the challenge, especially if you haven’t run your own business before.

You’ll want to avoid as many issues as possible early on if you want your company to survive past the first year.

Many of them will stem from the realm of advertising, so we’re going to cover some common marketing mistakes that small business owners tend to make.

If you steer clear of these, you should be able to avoid any major advertising issues.

You Don’t Find Your Niche

The largest pitfall new business owners fall into is not finding a niche for their products and services.

Going for a broad target market is a surefire way to fail because even if your business could theoretically serve everyone, it won’t.

You need to find a market that will go crazy over what you offer and target them specifically with your ads.

Once you’ve found a steady level of success with that group, you can branch out and try additional markets.

You Only Use One Form of Advertising

When you first start your marketing campaign, you’ll likely want to start with only one form of advertising until you get the hang of it.

However, once you get comfortable with it, you’ll want to branch out into other avenues quickly. Your target audience won’t just be in one location, and you’ll need to make sure you meet them where they are.

Another reason you should utilize multiple sources for your ads is because they can help each other out.

For example, there are multiple ways that social media and pay-per-click (PPC) ads affect each other, but all forms of marketing can impact one another.

You Never Check Your Analytics

None of these potential interactions matter if you aren’t tracking them. Analytics is an essential part of marketing that many new entrepreneurs overlook.

Imagine if you didn’t keep track of your budget and expenses. That’s not something you’d ever want to do. You need to know where your money goes, and the same applies to marketing.

You need to know which forms of advertising produce results and which don’t. If you never check your analytics, you could be wasting time and money.

You Don’t Take Your Competition Seriously

One of the biggest marketing mistakes that many small businesses make is not taking their competition’s advertising efforts seriously.

Whether they’re veterans in the industry or newer than you are, you need to treat them all as potential threats to your company.

That doesn’t mean you should try to take them down, but you don’t want to ignore their efforts.

Who knows? You could even learn a thing or two by checking out how they’re running their marketing campaigns.