10 Mistakes Marketing Managers Should Avoid
Marketing is a concept often over-looked or undermined by top-level managers. Approving annual budgets or resource increases can prove to be tiresome to marketing managers that must prove, every time that the work they do is important and valuable and is what creates revenue, because top-level management sometimes doesn’t understand that marketing isn’t an expense, it’s an investment.
However, with these setbacks and budget cuts come mistakes marketing managers can’t help but make.
- Hiring companies to carry out their market research and not knowing anything about their own market. Hiring professionals to do the job is always the best course of action; however, not understanding at least the fundamentals or basics of what these professionals are doing can send companies down a path of over-payment and complete reliance on third party companies. So, despite what many managers may believe, outsourcing does not always cut costs and it definitely not always effective.
- Not doing marketing research. This is a major faux pas. Market research is ultimately what tells you who will buy your product. Selling to everyone and anyone will exhaust your resources without wielding any tangible ROI.
- Going with the flow. Companies that carry out spur-of-the-moment marketing without a preconceived plan or budget end up spending way more than those that do plan properly. Strategies are what help markers set a plan and its corresponding budget for the foreseeable future, making mistakes and extra costs easier to avoid.
- No clear call-to-action. Nice looking expensive ads are useless if they do not compel consumers to do something; buy, shop, visit – without these, consumers will just appreciate what seems to be a nice piece of art that is of no particular value to them.
- Not measuring the results. Businesses that have no plan, tend to have no KPIs and no way of measuring success because they don’t know what it is they should measure to know if they succeeded or failed. It’s like selling a product and not calculating the profit you made. This basically renders all marketing efforts pointless.
- Failing to invest in digital marketing. How awesome would it be if advertisers can reach specific people with an interest in their product at home or at work without spending huge amounts of money? Pretty awesome, and it’s done with digital marketing. With the world having gone digital, it makes sense to follow the trend and go digital.
- Ignoring your competitors. If you pretend they aren’t there, they won’t go away. In fact, they may just get stronger. Remember what happened to Nokia? They decided they were going to ignore the whole “smart phone” idea their competitors were dabbling in. Didn’t work out so well for Nokia, did it?
- Thinking a few bad customer experiences won’t do you much harm. Stories spread like wild fire on the internet. Bad reviews that are ignored will lead to lost customers and lost prospects. This basically means you will lose money and possibly even end up with a tarnished reputation, and those take a lot more effort and money to fix than satisfying a few angry customers.
- Fall into a marketing routine. People like change. If you don’t change up your game every once in a while, people will get bored and you will eventually lose your existing customers, not just prospects. It’s important to keep up with your audience and the trends it follows. Try out new things, think outside the box and experiment. Creativity is often what makes the money in this line of work.
- Overlooking old customers. Ignoring the people that already bought your products and solely focusing on acquiring new customers is something every marketing manager should not do, simply because it has been proven that losing old customers is actually more expensive than acquiring new ones because new customers have a shorter life-time value than old ones. Loyal customers that are happy will keep returning to buy more of your products and that in turn creates revenue.
Marketing is one of the most important departments in a company and without marketing, nobody will know that company’s products and services exist. Consequently, proper marketing techniques are what make a company and rake in the customers and their money
