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Common Marketing mistakes

Common Marketing Mistakes can kill your business, do you doubt it? Well lets see!

Using only secondary research. Relying on the published work of others doesn’t give you the full picture. It can be a great place to start, of course, but the information you get from secondary research can be outdated. You can miss out on other factors relevant to your business.
Using only web resources. When you use common search engines to gather information, you get only data that are available to everyone and it may not be fully accurate. To perform deeper searches while staying within your budget, use the resources at your local library, college campus or small-business center.
Surveying only the people you know. Small-business owners sometimes interview only family members and close colleagues when conducting research, but friends and family are often not the best survey subjects. To get the most useful and accurate information, you need to talk to real customers about their needs, wants and expectations.

Marketing mistakes

More Mistakes and solution : Trying to Serve Everyone

The blessing and the curse of many entrepreneurs is that they’re good-hearted, and really want to make world a better place.

The blessing part is easy to figure out… but the curse? By trying to help everyone with their product or service… They often end up helping no one.

Having too broad of a target market is probably the single most common marketing mistake people make. In order to stand out in the crowd, you need to be really specific with which sub-segment of the population you’re targeting. The narrower your niche, the better.

Now you’re probably thinking… “Ahh, but what about all these other prospective customers I’ll be giving up on?” I get that.

You have to think about it the other way: get excited about how well you’re going to be able to serve the specific customers you’re going after. By focusing on a specific group, you’ll be able to serve them much better and have a more profound impact on their life.

Let’s go concrete with this. When you’re describing your ideal customer, you should be able to get highly descriptive of that person, both on a demographic and psychographic level.

For example, “Men between the age of 25 and 40” is a lousy target market. Instead, it should be something like “Professional men between 25 and 40 who live in major cities, are passionate about the outdoors, who struggle to find time for their hobbies, and are afraid that their best years are passing them by”. Now we’re talking. This is a target you can really help… and make a lot of money in the process.

Solution: Write down the main characteristics of your ideal customer. Describe their frustrations, fears, and aspirations. Get as deep and as personal as you can. You want to able to put yourself in their skin and feel what they feel, think what they think.