Marketing mistakes

The concept of multi-channel marketing is hardly new. However, in recent years it has gone from relating to radio, print and television advertising, to encompassing social media, online marketing and even networking.

The principles, however, remain the same: you need consistent branding and a well-planned strategy to be as effective as possible. If you’re struggling to make your marketing work, perhaps you’re falling into one of these common traps.

Audience: You need to know who you’re talking to in order to reach them effectively. Work out who you want to target and research what will strike a chord with them.

Speed: While marketing can require patience, you can’t expect your customers to feel the same. It may take you several months to build an effective Facebook page which brings you new patients, but they won’t be willing to wait more than a minute or two for your content to load. Make sure your website – and any other online content – runs like clockwork.

Attention: Similarly, don’t be tempted to overwhelm people with detail. While it’s good to have information readily available, research shows people have very short attention spans. Nobody is going to read a 1,000 word blog post, no matter how interesting you think it is. Instead, grab their attention and prompt them to take the next step with a powerful call to action.

Interest: People will soon grow bored with businesses which do nothing but promote themselves on social media. While a bit of self-promotion is fine from time to time, it’s more important to build up a sense of community, trust and loyalty, so they understand these qualities are intrinsic to your brand.

Strategy: This is the most common thing businesses struggle with. They know they ought to be advertising or using social media, but they forget the reasons why. Unless you know what you’re trying to achieve, you’ll never get the most out of your marketing. Ensure you have all the relevant stats – return on investment, conversion rate and so on – and analyse them on a regular basis to keep things on track.

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