Are you making these mistakes with your marketing?

They’re the 11 most common traps business owners fall into with marketing… and if you’ve been tripped up by one of them, you could be destroying your chances of success without even realising it…

Best wishes,

Marie-Louise Cook
Editor – Daily Marketing Bulletin

11 Message Killers You Must Avoid In Marketing – Part 1

When learning from others, one of the best things to learn from them is their mistakes. The following is a list of the 11 most common mistakes made by marketers everywhere.

The #1 Killer – Stressing Image Over Substance

Image advertising is all about you and your business. How great you are, your qualifications, years in business, full-service product line, etc. But your prospects don’t care about you, they care about themselves. Anyone reading or listening to your ad has one question in mind: “What’s in it for me?”

Simply put, an image ad has no way to track results. Its goal is to keep the company name in front of the public and often tries very hard to be clever. Watch any beer and soft drink commercials and you’ll know what I mean. By contrast, a direct response ad is trackable using “coded” responses like: “ask for John Miller”. Your business knows exactly which ads their prospects are responding to. This helps you measure the effectiveness of each ad.

Killer #2 – Not Taking Time To Educate

Your main objective should be to educate your prospect using several steps. Your first ad could be to get their attention and spark their interest enough to contact you. Your next may be purely educational. If your prospect still doesn’t bite, your next step should be to provide more information using follow-up marketing techniques.

High-ticket items require an extensive one-on-one educational and sales process. Your prospect needs to be educated about the benefits of your products or services, their options, why yours is better than your competition, why you are charging the price you charge, and a host of other things. Lower-priced items can be sold in a one-step model and in many cases they have to be because the dollars just aren’t there to support an extended multiple step marketing campaign.

The trick is to give your prospect a reason to continue investigating your offer in the first advertisement.

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