If your ecommerce marketing campaigns aren't living up to your expectations, then you're probably doing something wrong. Too many entrepreneurs are making easy to erase mistakes.
Here are 7 common marketing mistakes you need to avoid:
1. Over Targeting
It's important to recognize your target market and focus
your marketing strategies towards them. Find out where you're getting conversions and direct your energy to that audience.
2. Lack of Focus
There are new marketing techniques emerging each day that
clever business owners can take advantage of. While diving into these new portals is definitely worth looking into, it's not necessarily beneficial
to abandon or diminish your current methods to start over each time something new emerges. Stake your territory immediately so you own your business name as a username (now's a good time to think about Pinterest & Google +), but keep your efforts on the back-burner until you're sure the juice will be worth the squeeze.
3. Not Pulling Enough Data
Do you know which of your marketing efforts are converting customers? Can you track sales from Twitter, Facebook, Blog Posts, and LinkedIn? If you don’t utilize
some sort of tracking system to confirm which methods work and which ones
don’t, you're wasting time and money.
4. No Clear Call To
Action
When you're putting together your marketing campaigns you want
your potential clients to know what you’re selling and how to get it immediately. Without a clear call to action, your efforts are quickly wasted because the customers you catch in your net quickly swim away.
5. Missing Free Marketing Opportunities
Today there are tons of low cost marketing
platforms (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) that
should be taken advantage of. Putting some thoughtful effort into social media will likely cut costs and widen your exposure.
6. Giving Up Too
Easy
It can take some time to know if your marketing angle is
working. If you give up too fast you will never know if you were on the right
track, so stick with it for a while and never stop pulling data and optimizing.
7. Not Knowing
When To Pivot
Sometimes you need to recognize when a
marketing strategy is simply not working. Maybe you have misread your target
market, or maybe your campaign is out-dated and stale. Sometimes you need to
know when enough is enough.
One of the most forgotten marketing mistakes is poor customer service.
From a design perspective we’ve worked with customers in the past helping them define a marketing strategy which isn’t backed with same confidence and competence in it’s customer service and delivery.
You can invest all the money you like in advertising and marketing, however, if you don’t deliver and your company earns a bad reputation, it’s a hard stain to paint over.
Mark Hayes
March 26 2012, 09:48AM
Robert: So true. Reputation is huge, and consumers are becoming more and more savvy. Review sites, comparison charts, and and word of mouth are all fuelled by reputation and often customer service is a huge part of it.
Shawn Graham
March 26 2012, 10:57AM
Data should help drive your strategy but, at the same time, you also need to balance sifting through numbers with actually selling your products and creating new content.
To Robert’s point, customer service is also a biggie. Attracting new customers takes a lot of time and money and that means you definitely don’t want to turn them away due to a lack of responsiveness or bad experience.
Jon
March 26 2012, 09:41PM
Hey Mark, you mentioned free marketing… could you direct me on that?
Jim Morrison
March 27 2012, 10:14AM
Mark thanks for the information I will be sharing it with the staff here
Ramon
December 25 2012, 11:03PM
Mark, very good info resource, thanks!!
We have the typical eCommerce problem: tons of Likes in facebook, not that many sales at our .com
Since we are marketing jewelry (inexpensive imitation jewelry, really) we understand the thing customers miss is not being able to see and try on on our stuff. How can we overcome that?
We’ve been even told to raise our prices so people will think we are a lot bigger and fancier than we really are!!??
Great post guys,
One of the most forgotten marketing mistakes is poor customer service.
From a design perspective we’ve worked with customers in the past helping them define a marketing strategy which isn’t backed with same confidence and competence in it’s customer service and delivery.
You can invest all the money you like in advertising and marketing, however, if you don’t deliver and your company earns a bad reputation, it’s a hard stain to paint over.
Robert: So true. Reputation is huge, and consumers are becoming more and more savvy. Review sites, comparison charts, and and word of mouth are all fuelled by reputation and often customer service is a huge part of it.
Data should help drive your strategy but, at the same time, you also need to balance sifting through numbers with actually selling your products and creating new content.
To Robert’s point, customer service is also a biggie. Attracting new customers takes a lot of time and money and that means you definitely don’t want to turn them away due to a lack of responsiveness or bad experience.
Hey Mark, you mentioned free marketing… could you direct me on that?
Mark thanks for the information I will be sharing it with the staff here
Mark, very good info resource, thanks!!
We have the typical eCommerce problem: tons of Likes in facebook, not that many sales at our .com
Since we are marketing jewelry (inexpensive imitation jewelry, really) we understand the thing customers miss is not being able to see and try on on our stuff. How can we overcome that?
We’ve been even told to raise our prices so people will think we are a lot bigger and fancier than we really are!!??