Dastardly Marketing Mistakes – Don’t Sabotage Your Marketing
Regardless of the types of media a business uses in its marketing campaign, the goal is always a conversion – the point at which an interested consumer, who has been exposed to your advertisement, becomes a sale.
The process leading up to that conversion is the traditional sales funnel. In the old days, there wasn’t much of a funnel at all. A potential consumer was exposed to a TV, radio or print advertisement, she walked through the business’ doors, and the sales person closed the deal. But, the modern consumer is infinitely more complicated for a business – she has a wealth of readily accessible information at her fingertips to assist with her purchasing decision.
The modern sales funnel has become much deeper than ever and we find that more and more businesses are self-sabotaging otherwise strong advertising by committing at least 1 of these 4 marketing mistakes. Most solid campaigns start with a mass appeal form of media like television, radio or print in an effort to attract a large consumer base to the top of your funnel. Because 80% of all consumers are online, the advertiser lists a website. It’s here that things can start to go wrong, quickly. Here is a list of sabotage tactics to avoid in your marketing.
A Lame Website
Your obvious goal by listing your website in an advertisement is to gain more visitors, more clicks, and ultimately more sales. There is no faster way to lose the attention of your visitor than having a lame website. You have roughly 10 seconds to capture the attention of the average 1st time visitor on your site. If you lose their attention the first time, they aren’t coming back and you managed to lose any chance of a sale.
FACT: A Word Document loaded with text about your business and pictures attached along with flashing crawlers at the top of the screen does not qualify as a website anymore. With literally hundreds of inexpensive, simplified site design tools like WordPress, Weebly, etc., there is no excuse to have a lame website.
A Negative Online Reputation
This is a major part of the previously mentioned wealth of consumer information. Not knowing the quality of your online reputation definitely qualifies as a fail. Google, Yelp, Yellow Pages and Facebook, just to name a few, give consumers the ability to rate their experience with your business. You can serve 99 happy customers a day, but that 1 who leaves unhappy will be the first to post a review. 70% of online users will read some type of consumer review before making a final purchase decision. Monitoring your online reputation means asking your satisfied customers to give you a review and answering those negative reviews in a polite and professional manner, offering to solve the issue.
Unimpressive Social Media Presence
If you have taken the steps to create a Facebook page, then there’s no turning back. Once you’ve established a social media footprint, it’s sink or swim. Facebook is the 2nd most used website in the world outside of Google. Because it is so widely used, a business’ Facebook page will often be listed at the top of a search. You should think of your social media as your company’s first impression on a customer. If you don’t update your page for months at a time, repeatedly posting self-serving sales messages, it conveys a negative first impression.
Poor Phone Etiquette
We run across this issue almost every day with businesses: inconsistency and ineptitude on the phone. Everyone in your business who is allowed to answer the phone should do so the same way. It amazes me that so many companies don’t have similar instructions. Once again, this may be the first impression a potential consumer will get from your business. A caller interested in purchasing a product will typically not bother to call back if most of their questions can’t be answered in the first call. No matter what type of business you have, every caller should get a polite and professional greeting, be asked to leave their name, phone number, what they are calling about and any other questions they may have.
The good news is that these all 4 of these things can be fixed in a matter of weeks, not months. The effectiveness of your current ad campaign can be maximized very quickly. Before you tell yourself that your TV or radio commercials aren’t working, take a second to think about how well your conversion process is set up.
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