For any small business, time and money are way too valuable for any wastage to be tolerated. Granted everyone in business always wants to do what most others are doing to promote their products/services in the market place. It gets real difficult most times. That is because marketing is no easy task. It is where some business owners at times get to overdo certain things thereby occasioning some avoidable wastage. When developing
your own marketing strategy, you must take care to avoid wasting your time and money unnecessarily. Here is what to look out for and try to avoid.
01. Casting your marketing net too wide. Almost always, you get better returns on your investments and
your marketing efforts work better if you target your audience effectively. Experience has shown that if you cast your marketing nets too wide, you end up wasting valuable time and money marketing to the wrong people in the wrong places. That clearly is a waste which is avoidable.
02. Untargeted video marketing. If you rightly assume that your customers are watching videos online, you must find out where. First you must try to know on what platforms your videos would be viewed on before you even create one. That is because creating videos for social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram for instance requires
different approaches and strategies for the simple reason that videos are consumed differently on both platforms. Doing otherwise leads to avoidable wastage creating videos which are not well targeted.
03. Using too many social media channels. The more the merrier is hardly relevant when it comes to marketing on social media. If you are one of those marketers who still believe you need to be everywhere on social media, you are simply wasting your very valuable time, effort and money. When you decide to market on social media platforms, what is most important is to target your customers exactly where they are already spending their time. Just take your business to them in the social media where they already are. That saves you time and money.
04. Creating irrelevant content. We hear marketing experts say “content is king” when it comes to blogging for business. And that you need regular and fresh content all the time. Great! But that’s not all. What is important is that your content must be relevant to be useful. That is what helps your customers who want to
build a relationship with your business. They appreciate your business more when you regularly give them valuable, relevant and fresh content which helps them. Irrelevant content is clearly a waste of time and money in that wise.
05. Wrong use of influencer marketing. Influencer marketing is good for your business if the influencer is in the right industry. To get good value from the advice of influencers, they must be right for your business and they must also have some visible and identifiable reputation. If however you’re in an obscure industry or you create products for a small niche market, influencers are probably not going to be of much help to you. Using influencers for such business will clearly be a waste of time, effort and money. Therefore, you can do well to avoid wasting your time and money on some low impact influencer or one in the wrong industry.
