The 7 Biggest Marketing Mistakes Made By Startups and SMBs?

This article has been edited to minimise the ROI for your reading time. Read the full article on the 47 Insights Blog.

Marketing mistake #1 - Not starting with the end in mind

(The full version begins with a confession!)

Some questions to ask yourself:

• What results are you looking to achieve via your marketing?
• How do these compare with where you are now?
• Can you visualize how these results will be achieved?
• Can you make it happen without burning out you and your team?
• How are you going to balance these goals with the rest of your life?

Marketing mistake #2 - No marketing plan, no budget

I estimate 90% of all startups and SMBs ‘fly by the seat of their pants’ with no marketing plan and no budget. They end up jumping from one initiative to another without any strategy or planning. Author of Watertight Marketing, Bryony Thomas, explains why this ‘yo-yo marketing’ is so damaging to a business and exhausting for everyone involved. If this sounds familiar to you, I recommend you read Bryony's book. Start by setting yourself a 12-month marketing budget and some SMART goals. Then create a more detailed activity plan for the first 90 days to keep you on track. Measure what you do but don’t be afraid to change something it if isn’t working. There's no point is slavishly sticking to a failing plan!

Marketing mistake #3 - Concentrating on only one marketing channel or activity

(The full version recounts how a company I once worked because very successful very quickly by innovating their marketing)

Whatever ‘killer’ marketing channel or activity you are using now, I can guarantee you that your results will fall over time. Your marketing has to be a mix of activities that you constantly experiment and measure. Prolonged ‘mono-marketing’ will weaken your business over time, ultimately affecting both its profitability and ability to compete in the market.

Marketing mistake #4 - Not knowing your competition

If you don’t do any initial or ongoing competitor research it’s likely you will either fail to gain traction in the market or lose market share due to an uncompetitive offering.

(The full version includes a rather long example of this from my own personal experience)

Learn from my mistakes. Look out for a future blog post on how to do online competitor research and analysis. I’ll publish it here on LinkedIn once it’s ready.

Marketing mistake #5 - DIY marketing

Trying to do all your marketing yourself? Good luck with that. An example of this that springs to mind is Pay Per Click advertising. I have lost count of the number of business owners I have seen who throw money at Google AdWords without a clue what they are doing.

(The full version contains some comments about Google's PPC business practices)

Having been both a startup and small business owner I know that you need to spend your marketing dollars, euros or even pounds (while they are still worth something) wisely. The smartest thing to do is to actually hire an expert rather than trying to do it all yourself. If you are the business owner or marketing manager in a startup or SMB your should think of yourself as a conductor of a ‘marketing orchestra’ comprised of experts.

Marketing mistake #6 - The ‘Field of Dreams’ website

In the 1989 movie, Field of Dreams, Ray Kinsella is an Iowa farmer who builds a baseball diamond in one of his cornfields under the illusion that “if you build it, people will come”. Nearly 30 years later and many business owners are still laboring under that same illusion with their websites.

(The full version explains how you should allocate budget for a new website)

I cannot think of any business where a website is not the hub of its marketing. And while websites have never been as easy and low cost to produce as they are now, marketing your site and business needs to be an ongoing investment.

Marketing mistake #7 - Not measuring your marketing

Last and definitely not least, the conundrum that is marketing measurement.

To paraphrase John Wanamaker, it is almost certain that at least half the money you spend on marketing is being wasted. Why? Because attribution (working out which marketing activity is responsible for which outcome) is still messy and imperfect even today, nearly a century after Wanamaker’s death. But it is getting easier and it’s for this reason that most businesses have shifted (and are continuing to shift) so much of their marketing budget to the more measurable digital techniques and channels.

(The full version includes some observations regarding the origin of digital marketing techniques)

So what should you be measuring? It would be impossible for me to say what marketing metrics would be right for your specific business. But in principle I would try and avoid vanity metrics like the number of visits to your website, clicks on your ads or likes for your tweets. Instead focus on behaviourial outcomes such as the number of goals completed in Google Analytics or conversions made in pay per click ads. Remember, ‘clicks are vanity, conversions are sanity’.

(The full version includes my views on marketing KPIs)

Are there bigger startup and SMB marketing mistakes?

Obviously these are just my personal views. So what are the biggest marketing mistakes you have seen or even been responsible for? Let me know in the comments.