5 Biggest Marketing Mishaps That Are Hurting Your Sales
People need to know about the products or services that a business is offering to buy, making marketing a critical function in any business. Without it, companies cannot meet their sales targets.
Although companies can use numerous marketing strategies to reach their target audiences, they need to identify the most effective ones and plan and execute marketing strategies effectively to realize the intended results. Marketing mishaps in planning or executing strategies can derail campaigns and hurt sales.
If you’re already executing a marketing strategy but aren’t realizing the results you want, below are the five biggest marketing mishaps that may be hurting your sales:
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Misalignment Between Sales And Marketing
One of the biggest marketing mistakes that hurt sales in businesses is the lack of alignment between the sales and marketing functions. Aligning sales and marketing functions involves the development of shared goals, strategies, and communication systems that allow teams in both functions to work together to increase sales effectiveness, deliver impactful marketing activities, and increase revenue. This means both teams participate in planning marketing activities- continue reading here.
Aligning the two teams creates a good working relationship that ensures marketing teams only send high-quality leads to sales teams. It also ensures that sales teams address each of those leads and that none of them gets wasted. This collaboration increases productivity, boosts sales revenue, and saves business resources and time that otherwise would be wasted in pursuit of low-quality leads.
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Not Including Video In Your Strategy
Videos are expected to account for up to 82 % of internet traffic in 2022, which is why they should form part of your marketing strategy. Without using videos, your business will lose sales. Videos help you pass marketing messages to your audience fast. You can convey the text on an entire sales page in a two-minute video.
Your audience would be willing to give you two minutes of their time than the ten minutes they’d need to read a sales page. Further, videos appeal to the senses, which causes them to appeal to different audiences, whether they prefer to learn through text, images, or text. Your audience can choose to read our video captions or listen to them while doing something else.
This keeps them engaged and increases their chances of making a purchase. Making videos a core part of your marketing strategy can help people feel comfortable with your brand. They’ll more likely buy from you and push your sales up when they do. The opposite is true; reaching your audience without videos will be difficult, resulting in decreased sales.
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Not Using Testimonials
Another big marketing mishap that hurts sales in businesses is the failure to use testimonials to build trust. People buy from companies they trust. Whether you run a well-established or new business, your target audience must trust you to buy from you. Testimonials from satisfied customers are powerful tools when it comes to building trust. However, most businesses overlook satisfied customers, yet nothing drives sales better than their word.
You can start building trust by identifying satisfied customers and asking them for testimonials. Prepare a simple form and use it to ask buyers for feedback after making a purchase. Organize the questions so that the first questions emphasize positive experiences and end the form with a request for consent for your business to use the feedback as a testimonial.
Turn the glowing testimonials into marketing tools- place them on your website’s strategic pages like the home page, sales page, and product page. Have the testimonials on your newsletters and social media pages as well. Since testimonials are endorsements from customers about the trustworthiness of your business, not using them can hurt your sales.
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Not Connecting With Target Audiences
Businesses can miss out on opportunities to get more customers and increase sales revenue if they don’t connect with their audiences. Most marketing strategies involve reaching target audiences with marketing messages.
However, customer behavior has changed, and most buyers want to connect with the people behind the business, not the business. Hiding behind your company’s brand causes you to miss out on a huge opportunity to connect with potential customers.
As the business owner, you are a vital part of the brand that your audience wants to see. This doesn’t mean spending huge amounts on a camera crew and professional hair or makeup. Use your smartphone with essential lighting to record videos and share them with your audience. Consider taking behind-the-scene videos- let your audience see your team and the work that goes into making the products or services they enjoy.
By seeing the real, authentic people in your business, your audience will better and more profitably connect you and your business.
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Tracking Performance Using Misleading Metrics
Tracking marketing goals is critical in measuring performance and determining which strategies work and which ones aren’t. This requires businesses to use the right metrics. However, some companies use misleading metrics to track performance, which hurts their sales in the long run.
Although the metrics you use to measure marketing performance can vary depending on the strategies, focusing on metrics like social media reach and likes can be misleading.
Valuable metrics align well with your marketing goals and are accurate. For example, if your aim is to boost sales, key performance indicators could include annual recurring revenue, conversion rates, engagement rate, and win rate.
Final Thoughts
Marketing is a vital function in any business, whether big or small. Typically, marketing involves informing people about your product or service offerings and getting them interested in them. Companies use various marketing strategies to reach their audiences with marketing messages, nurture them and convert them into paying customers.
But developing and implementing a marketing strategy isn’t a guarantee that a business will realize its sales revenue target. Even with a good marketing strategy, various mishaps could hurt your sales. As you develop and execute your company’s marketing strategy, paying attention to the five mishaps discussed above can help you realize your sales goal.