10 Common Small Business Marketing Mistakes

If you’re a small business owner, you’ll usually have to wear a number of different hats during the day to day running of your business and it’s not easy to be an expert in many different areas.

Marketing your business effectively is critical to its short and long term success, so here we’ve identified 10 of the most common online marketing mistakes small businesses make.

Not identifying a target market

Before you do any marketing at all, it pays to have a clear idea of who your product or service is aimed at. When it comes to designing your website and writing the content for it, you need to appeal to the people you want to buy your product or service and connect with them.

Not doing enough research

If your small business is offering a new or innovative product or service, how do you know that people will either need it or want it? The time to find out is not when you’ve had a website designed and spent a fortune on Google Adwords with little or no return; it’s at the planning stage.

Building a poor quality DIY website

In 2009, almost £50 billion was spent on internet retail sales in the UK, so if you want a share of the online market, your website will need to be up to scratch. There’s fierce competition online in almost every market sector so a poor quality website that looks homemade will not do you any favours at all.

Communicating features rather than benefits

Confusing features and benefits when it comes to website copy is a very common mistake. Let’s say you were selling golf balls online, a feature could be that they have a titanium core but why would that interest the reader? The benefit would be that you can hit them longer distances which of course would appeal to most golfers.

Advertising once and giving up

It’s widely accepted that people often have to see an advert or brand name 6 or 7 times before they will act on it. So if you decide to advertise your business online via Pay per Click, it pays to run a campaign consistently rather than doing it once and deciding it’s the wrong way to market your business.

Copying your competitors

Whether you’re trying to compete at a local or national level, copying your competitors is never a good idea whether it’s having very similar content on your website or using the same words on your Pay per Click adverts. Be innovative, do something different and people will notice your business.

Focusing all your attention on getting new business

It’s all too easy as a small business to concentrate on gaining new customers and forgetting about your previous or existing ones. Email marketing is a cost effective way to communicate with your client base and help keep them as loyal customers.

Not advertising when you’re doing well

If you fail to market your business when things are going well then you will find it difficult to expand as well as potentially missing out on lucrative orders for the future. For example shutting down a successful Pay per Click campaign or deciding to stop emailing past customers doesn’t make good business sense.

Having separate online and offline messages

It’s important to treat your online and offline marketing as one overall strategy. Too many small businesses fall into the trap of not combining their marketing efforts and end up with a haphazard approach that’s confusing to customers.

Failing to measure your marketing results

If you don’t measure your marketing results, how will you know what marketing efforts are worth continuing with and what’s losing you money? A simple “How did you find us?” option on an online contact form or analysing your Pay per Click statistics regularly can help you measure your return on investment.

Does Your Business Need Strategic Marketing?

The UK market is crammed with “marketing experts” and marketing agencies. All offering different solutions to the “growing your business” conundrum. From Web design to innovative Social Media Marketing, from clever PR to the all important creation of SEO.

It is a minefield and do you actually need all of these facets of marketing to grow? Probably not so here are the Igneous Marketing “10 signs you need to look at strategic marketing”

1.    You’re not 100% sure where new business actually comes from – how do they find your site? What prompts them to pick up the phone, etc?

2.    You’ve done some work with an agency, but you weren’t too chuffed with the output – what was the brief?

3.    You get lots of leads, but they don’t seem to convert – what is the sales journey, and how well supported is it with powerful marketing content?

4.    You get enquiries for work that you don’t really like doing – is your business clear about what it does best?

5.    You’re always screwed down on price – does your brand and messaging set your business apart?

6.    When asked what your business does, your people all say something different – is your team clear on what you’re about?

7.    You rarely get repeat business or referrals – is your customer marketing and networking strategy creating advocates for your business?

8.    If one big customer left you’d be in trouble – is your business over reliant on one customer, or one market?

9.    You’ve tried telemarketing, PR, advertising or another tactic and it hasn’t delivered – do you have an integrated plan with momentum that all fits together and ties into your sales process?

10.  You’ve read the books and been to some courses – do you know that you need to give marketing some attention, but never quite get around to it when you’re back at the office?

These are all real scenarios that we’ve heard from small business owners in the last 18 months. Small businesses often make do with a ‘marketing-come-reception’ set-up, working with the marketing suppliers run by friends of friends, or the people down the road. And, there’s nothing wrong with that… if you know exactly what you’re doing on the marketing front.

You must lead the way and have a clear objective on what you want your business to look like, how you want to be perceived and what you want to achieve. No marketing agency can dictate this, it must come from you – the business visionary.

To help you with this daunting task Igneous Marketing are offering a free marketing review for small businesses. Simply complete the document here and we will review what you are doing and provide insight into how you can grow your business.

This is a 100% free, no obligation report created especially for you. Get a different perspective, click here to start

Small Business Website Tips

5 Business Website Tips

These days, having a presence online is of the utmost importance for businesses, with most potential clients using online searches to find the products and services they require. For small companies, having a business website doesn’t have to mean an extravagant expense or a time consuming design project, but it can bring vital benefits, such as:

Increasing your customer base. If you have a website it means you can be quickly and easily found online. Potential customers will use the web to research the products or services they need and being online means you have a presence 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Showcase your services. Your business website gives you the chance to offer full details on all your products and services, meaning your customers will know straight away that you can offer the things they need.

Let customers know where you are. Not only can a business website explain your services, but it can also give details of where to find you and how to get in touch. Making these things easy for customers means they are more likely to give you a call or visit your shop.

Become well known. Your web presence gives your customers confidence in your business and your brand, which means they will turn to you time and time again.

Turn your high street shop into an online shop. Why not customize your business website into an online shop, meaning you can reach even more potential customers around the country and not just in your local area.

Top 5 SME Marketing Tips

Hi

Welcome to the New and Improved Igneous Marketing Blog

Lets start of with a few easy to follow tips:

Here are the most effective top five options to gain access at your business stats amongst the competitors planning and customers demands according to the current need and quality available in the same sector of market you are dealing to become the most powerful one.

 

#1. Add quality and build relationship :- Keep improving the quality of your business, products or services because that is the main preference when you buys and use any service according to your need and then only the brands come in mind that not promises to deliver the value but delivers the same what you really need. If your products and services are getting more in quality then the next step should always be relationship with the consumers in the means of talking and providing the value as they want.

 

#2. Be available for your customers :- I have seen alot of companies don’t thinks about promoting their office address, phone numbers, email id’s and the most important personal availability to the employees and the consumers in their day to day life for solving their problems with your products or services and try to solve that all in their own knowledge.

 

#3. Study the demand of your customers :- It may be another hazardous mistake of the companies if not getting listed in the market in comparison of competitors after giving the required demands from loyal customers of a specific service or product. So start covering the topics what is in the demand of your customers and what will be best for them if consumes your products regularly.

 

#4. Keep buzzing with discounts and offers :- Now a days it’s the need of small business to make it promoting on the regular basis with the attractive offers and discounts and that all should be better than your competitors one. The offers should contain surely a new and attractive idea rather than the repetition that is coming time to time from the other business owners and public is taking a little interest.

 

#5. Learn from your better days :- Every business may have encountered some better time in their business timeline because peoples always try to make trial on the new launches and thinks it may be another option in search of their real need for the product or service.

 

Now a days making a business from zero to hero is not the big deal but it is the really a big deal how to manage a well established business because of changing demand of the customers and the most important that there are a lot of producers of the same product offering some extra value at the reasonable price in comparison with others.