Every company must be a marketing company to compete, succeed and grow. There’s no way around it.
Most companies that understand the value and significance of marketing employ a marketing director, CMO or marketing agency.
Then there are some companies that value marketing, but not enough to hire a full-time marketing professional. They assign it to someone who agrees to take it on, but only when they have time. This isn’t a good idea. Such employees aren’t going to be familiar with marketing best practices and how marketing can backfire, causing brand damage if seemingly innocent shortcuts are taken.
Here are 10 mistakes marketers make that cause harm to their brands:
- Going to market with a soft or weak brand
Is your brand strong enough and compelling enough for potential customers to give it priority consideration above your competition when they need what you sell? Is your brand well-differentiated so that your target audience knows exactly why they should buy from you based on a strong value proposition? Marketing a soft or weak brand will do you more harm than good.
- Copycat marketing
Although everyone knows copycat marketing is verboten it happens more often than many would guess. No company will ever become a leader by copying competitors’ content and intellectual property.
- No marketing strategy
Those who fail to plan, plan to fail. Developing ad hoc, impromptu marketing campaigns drains budgets, is often ineffective and confuses customers.
- Inconsistent marketing
This is often the consequence of no one being in charge of marketing, which places salespeople in the awkward position of doing their own thing. Nothing confuses customers more than mixed and conflicting marketing messaging. It’s an ugly scene and will surely damage your brand.
- Failing to create well-rounded buyer personas
Targeted marketing is so 2022. Enter hyper-targeted marketing – highly personalized and relevant to individual types of buyers. When you consider the amount of marketing noise your buyers are subjected to every hour of every day, you’ll begin to appreciate and understand the value and effectiveness of hyper-targeted marketing.
- Overcommitting to too many marketing channels and tactics
Many marketers are led to believe that they need to be everywhere and do everything because you never know where or how you’re going to get the attention of your next prospective customer. This tune has changed. The better strategy is to be in a few places and do a few things exceptionally well.
- Outsourcing (too much) marketing to generative AI
As much as many marketers would like to think that generative AI will take care of their marketing, it’s nowhere near as capable as many wish it to be. I’ve tried to have AI produce interesting content as part of my marketing strategy, and it continually falls short of my expectations.
- Always shopping for a bargain
Although your gut tells you the more expensive person would deliver a higher quality product, you may wonder how low you can really go to get someone who will be tolerable, or at best, mediocre. In business, mediocrity sucks. Mediocrity translates to poor-quality work, excuses, missed deadlines, excuses, typos and misspellings, excuses, non-responsiveness, accidents and more excuses.
- Reactive instead of proactive marketing
Reactive marketing typically occurs when a company finds out that a competitor is launching a new campaign and follows suit. Reactive marketing drains budgets and is not measurable. Proactive marketing, on the other hand, enables marketers to forecast and prepare for new opportunities so that when opportunities present themselves, much of the work is already done.
- No one paying attention to the website
Websites need constant attention to ensure they’re functioning properly and doing what they’re supposed to do. The more common and larger problems occur when multiple people are given admin access to the site and start adding, deleting, changing and editing content without communicating with one another.
