Five Marketing Mistakes Business Owners Make

Introduction

Hey guys, welcome to the week of "When You Need Them, Ask Neadom." Today we're going to talk about the five mistakes most business owners make when marketing their business. Stay tuned to learn how you can keep yourself out of some hot water. See you then.

Brand Identification

Hey guys, this is Neadom Tucker, owner of Kotori Technologies, and today we're going to talk about the top five marketing mistakes that most business owners make. And the number five thing most business owners mistake is typically not understanding brand identification.

Now, what does that mean? I mean the brand—everybody's got a brand. Coke, you know Pepsi, you know Ikea—they've all got brands. But you as a business owner have to have your brand.

Too many times, I see business owners not understanding their brand and just wasting money on marketing. Wasting money on Facebook advertising. Wasting money on their website. Wasting money on Google AdWords.

It's really important to have your brand put together, to have a style guide, a style sheet put together so you have some overall semblance of what your brand looks like so when somebody sees your Facebook page, your Google, your website, your Instagram, or Twitter page, they can see the same fonts, graphics, and colors. All of those things really matter when you're trying to come up with your business and those plans.

Customer Identification

The number four thing where business owners make a mistake is not knowing your customer. I mean, this sounds really simple, but if you don't understand your customer then you're not going to be able to know how to market to them, right?

If your customer's somebody that likes blue widgets and you're selling red widgets, then you're not talking to the right customer. So, it's really important that you identify who your customer is.

The easiest way to do that is to build what we call a customer avatar. Take the best customer you have, go through your customer list, and find who your best customers are and write them down. Why are they your best customer? What industry are they in? Where do they live? Where do they work? What do they do?

Build this out and define who that person is. Did they graduate high school? College? Understanding who you're selling to is imperative, so you know how to talk to them.

If you're dealing with a millennial generation, you're not going to want to crack jokes about the 80s—they're not going to understand it. If your generation is a set of book readers, you're probably not going to talk a lot about movies because they spend a lot of time not watching TV and reading books.

Use your knowledge of who your existing customers are to help you and your business.

SWOT Analysis

The third mistake that most business owners make is they don't have a S.W.O.T. They don't understand the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats they have in their business.

You really have to understand what your strengths are, what your weaknesses are, what your opportunities in the market are, and who your threats are. Your threats are really your competitors in the market or potential economic threats.

You want to market your strengths, not your weaknesses. For example, if you're a small boutique and you can handle walk-in customers but not sell to warehouses in large quantities, don't market to that. Don't say, "Hey, we're going to do surplus business," if that's not one of your strengths.

This is really important when you're looking at keyword or search engine optimization. You're going to invest time and money in these things—don't just do a shotgun approach. Be very detailed.

Jim Collins wrote a book and he talks about firing small bullets. Once you narrow in on what you're going to hit and you hit the target, then fire more—fire bigger bullets, fire a bigger caliber cannon. Then you can start unloading all your money on it because you know it's working.

Know your S.W.O.T.—your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats—and that's going to help you.

Budget

The number two mistake that business owners make is not understanding the budget they need to market their business.

This ties into knowing your customer avatar. Are you marketing to consumers or businesses? Are you B2B or B2C? That will determine how much money you need to spend.

If you're a small boutique fitness location and want to do personal training, you can use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter to market your business—mostly for free. You’ll need to invest time, but you can do it on a very low budget.

But if you're marketing to businesses or want to go beyond local traffic, you’ll need to invest money. That includes SEO research, keyword analytics, and possibly pay-per-click advertising.

If you're using Facebook, use Facebook Pixel for retargeting. That means when someone visits your website, Facebook tracks them and shows them ads based on their behavior.

Time Commitment

The number one mistake most business owners make is not understanding the time commitment it takes to do marketing effectively.

You're going to spend four to ten hours a week marketing your business. Maybe two hours a night if you're a small business owner—answering Twitter feeds, Instagram messages, Facebook messages.

If you're doing what we do, you might spend eight to ten hours a day recording, investing in camera equipment, and everything else needed to run a YouTube show to educate clients.

There’s no magic button. Even if you hire a marketing company, you still have to be involved. They need to understand your mission, vision, and values. They need to understand you before they can find your customers. And they won’t get it right at first—you’ll need to realign.

It’s a huge time commitment.

Conclusion

So again, we talked about five reasons why it's important to understand what's involved in marketing and the mistakes business owners make by underestimating it. It's not rocket science—you just have to be prepared.

That sums up another week of "When You Need Them, Ask Neadom." If there's anything we can do for you, hit us up at http://www.kotoritechnologies.com. We'll try to answer any questions or help you out in any way we can.

Until next time—be safe and take care.