What Marketing Mistakes should Every Small Business Avoid?

You feel you've done marketing activities with the optimal, but the results have not been seen. Maybe you have one of the following seven mistakes in marketing. This is a list of the major mistakes that are often experienced by marketers.

1. Expects the customer coming self
One thought that often owned by marketers is to provide quality products and services then the customers will come by itself. This will not happen, unless your brand is already well known and have very loyal customers. Although your store is located in a strategic location, attractive shop display, have quality products and services that spectacular, but customers will not come as long as you do not do marketing well.

Create a unique value proposition to your target market. New products are always flooded the market, presenting a lot of choices to consumers. If you do not do marketing, consumer awareness of your products will increasingly fade with time, lost by awareness of competitors' products.

2. Have No Specific Target Markets
The second mistake that you believe that your products and services suitable for everyone. So, in your marketing activities are not targeted to a specific target market. Indeed, the company is not targeting a specific target market for fear of losing potential market segments. However, the result would not even catch the market value of products / services given to them.

Although you try to capture more market segments, focus on your primary target market. Prepare a unique value proposition for each segment of the potential market, so that they also see that you also provide value products.

3. Just imitates competitors' marketing strategy
The third mistake that marketers often get caught up to follow the marketing strategies of competitors. Competitors launched marketing strategy, which was then a huge success, so the marketers are tempted to do the same. In fact, your competitors may be larger, so if you are in direct competition with it, then your chances to win is small.

Do not follow a successful marketing strategy of the competitors away. There is a strategy that suits you, but there may be many differences. Aggregated and choose a strategy that suits your own conditions and needs. For example, invites competitors to a price war, let it go. You should focus more on value, not just price. Give the best value for consumers, by providing their needs and unfulfilled desires. Perform differentiation, and give reasons for customers to choose your product than competitors.

4. Less of Research and Testing
The fourth mistake is the inadequate research and testing before running the marketing activities. Marketing has been implemented, but in fact the results are not in accordance with expectations. So, before running the marketing activities previous research and testing should be done. Find out what the customer wants and needs. Perform due diligence before you make decisions related to marketing, whether it's price, supply, packaging, promotion, and others. Get feedback from your previous customers.

5. Regard Marketing as Expenses
Companies often look at marketing as an expense rather than investment. Marketing is not an essential part of business strategy. This is a fatal mistake. As a result, the company did not allocate enough resources to the field of marketing. Consequently receiving the money that goes into the company is also reduced.

Meanwhile, the marketing is different, because it would attract money into the company, not just spend the budget. Therefore, companies should allocate sufficient resources to marketing, so that marketing activities can be performed by optimal and contribute some revenue to the company.

6. Do not Know Customer Acquisition Cost
Another mistake is the case that management does not know exactly how much it costs to acquire a customer. Thus, there is no statistic that measures the customer lifetime value. In fact, this information is important for marketing decisions. By knowing the cost of customer acquisition and customer lifetime value, then you'll know how much you should invest in marketing.

Often companies invest more than the customer lifetime value, thus resulting in deteriorating financial condition. So, before doing the marketing activities, know first customer lifetime value of your potential customers.

7. Only focus on the acquisition of customers, not keep it
You must understand that your business can work well at this time are partly derived from existing customers, and the fraction of new customers. mistake that often happens is that marketers are focused solely on acquiring new customers, and forget about the existing customers. Relationship that has existed by existing customers are not supervised properly, but instead pursue new customers. Existing customers missing, while new customer acquisition costs are higher, as a result of unfavorable financially.