5 Mistakes Made By Businesses Who DIY Their Marketing

There are numerous reasons why, as a business owner, you choose to do your own marketing in-house. 

You could be a new business with limited funds, unable to outsource because of budget restraints. 

You could have been burnt by an experience in the past, where you trusted someone and they didn’t deliver the results you expected, so you’re now cautious about trusting anyone else

You could actually really enjoy marketing and want to learn how to do it yourself

I am always going to be an advocate for outsourcing the parts of your business that aren’t your areas of expertise, but if for some reason you can’t, won’t or don’t want to outsource your marketing, then I want to help you at least do it right, until you are in a position where you can, have to or decide to outsource your marketing to a professional.

Here are 5 of the biggest mistakes I see businesses making when they do their own marketing:

1. They don’t have a clear marketing strategy and/or plan. 

Your  Marketing Strategy is the roadmap for your marketing. It’s the “What”.  Without a clear and concise strategy in place, you won’t have clarity on where you’re trying to get to, or how you are going to get there. 

Your Marketing plan details the modes of transport you are going to use on your journey, so to speak. It’s the “How” … how are you going to deliver the strategy, what tactics are you going to use, what channels are you going to show up on etc. 

Without a clear strategy or plan, marketing efforts can be scattered and ineffective, and it can be difficult to measure the success of those efforts.

You need to focus on building a solid foundation for your business, otherwise you won’t be able to withhold the inevitable storms that will come your way from time to time.

2. They don’t know their target audience well enough. 

I would say that at least 95% of the time, when I talk to a new client, I will ask them who their target market is and they will give me demographic information. When I ask them to delve a little deeper, I am met with a blank face.

It is no longer enough to know just the age, gender and location of your audience. You have to understand them on a psychographic level too. 

Understanding the needs, preferences, and behaviors of a business’s target audience is essential for successful marketing. Without this knowledge, marketing efforts are likely to miss the mark. Your marketing messages will not be as effective, you won’t be able to speak directly to their pain points, you won’t know what language to use in order to make them feel heard. You won’t be relatable. 

All of these qualities are vital in order to build that know, like, trust factor that helps to nurture your audience, moving them down your funnel and, eventually, resulting in a conversion.

3. They don’t track their data or know how to use it to make decisions

When we don’t pay close attention to our data, we miss opportunities for growth, we miss mistakes that we then don’t know to correct and we can end up making the wrong strategic decisions. 

Collecting and analyzing data on the effectiveness of marketing efforts is crucial if you expect to be able to make informed decisions and improve your efforts over time. Without this data, it can be difficult to know what is working and what isn’t.

Even when business owners do track their marketing data, they often focus on the wrong metrics, or they make the mistake of not allowing enough data to accumulate before making knee jerk decisions, because they think something isn’t working. (More on this below)

4. They don’t have clarity regarding what sets them aside from their competitors

This also relates to having a solid strategy … the lack of which can lead to confusion around how it is that you stand out from your competitors. 

 A clear value proposition allows you to differentiate your business from your competitors and communicate the unique benefits of your products or services. Without a clear value proposition, it can be difficult for a business to effectively communicate its worth to potential customers.

You need to be able to clearly explain how your product or service fulfills a need. You need to be able to communicate how it is going to add value and why it adds more value than others in your market. 

If you don’t know what your USP is, you can’t expect potential clients to. 

5. They don’t allocate enough time and resources to marketing 

You need to give your marketing efforts time to gain traction and build momentum. Often there are two key errors made here: 

Business owners don’t allocate adequate resources to their marketing – that could be in the context of enough hands on deck, adequate budget for your goals, or it could be the right level of skill required. 

It’s important for businesses to adequately invest in marketing in order to see the desired results.

Secondly, as mentioned above, they don’t give their marketing efforts time to take effect before they make snap decisions and change things, because their perception is that what they are doing is not working. It is impossible to assess the effectiveness of a marketing campaign if you only let it run for a week before changing things around. 

Marketing is a delicate balance between knowing when to be patient and knowing when you may need to pivot. There needs to be a period of consistency, followed by a period of testing and optimisation,before you can comfortably know whether what you’re doing is or isn’t working. 

And the length of that period will differ amongst all the mediums and channels – there is not one-size-fits-all timeframe. Similarly, it will differ between each campaign too. 

Marketing takes time and resources to be effective, and businesses that don’t allocate enough of these can struggle to generate results from their marketing efforts. 

If you have found yourself making any of these mistakes, the good news is that there are still many budget appropriate options that are available to help you, at whatever stage of your business journey you are currently at. 

Make sure you start with a solid foundation, which come in the form of a good marketing strategy. If you need help with your strategy, check out my next enrolment date for my signature program – Strategy for Success!

If you are not quite ready for a program yet, then if you wish to, you can follow me on Instagram, where I share lots of useful marketing tips that you can easily implement in your business today, to make an impact.