Find out why your marketing efforts are not as effective as they could be, and discover 8 changes you can make that will help you target your audience better! Marketing mistakes can be a campaign killer – it’s therefore important to learn about common mistakes, and ways to avoid making them.
Not Understanding Your Customers
Not knowing what your customers want is one of the worst mistakes in marketing you can make and yet still fairly common. Understanding your audience will improve your conversion rates, drive better lead quality, and create new effective opportunities. This means you should:
- Use the same type of language your customers when discussing your product or service
- Avoid using cliches, especially in B2B marketing
- Stick to professional language but do not overuse technical jargon
Your marketing campaign should be based on answering customers’ needs, not on your own preferences.
Email Mistakes
Email marketing is an effective channel for driving revenue for the majority of B2B businesses. However, your emails may be getting ignored and here are 6 reasons why:
1. They Go Straight to the Spam Folder
The best way of preventing this from happening is to make sure that your subscribers white-list your emails by adding you as a contact. Though as this will require effort on the part of your customers, this may not always work. We’ve therefore come up with some other ways you can ensure your customers receive your email:
- Do not write your subject line in all-caps.
- Make sure you use proper spelling and grammar.
- Don’t overuse exclamation marks.
- Avoid using URL shorteners for links.
1. Boring Subject Lines
The value your content provides is particularly important for B2B. Your headlines have to promise value, otherwise they won’t even be opened. The tone and style of your email header are also very important. Try to make it professional but not like an encyclopedia entry, short and to the point and as personalised as possible. Little details like addressing the customer with their name, mentioning something of interest to them or targeting them via location will make a good impact.
It’s also beneficial to have different types of content that include: announcements, educational value, recent publications, posts or content if appropriate. This makes it more probable that your audience will find something they will enjoy in your email. The key is to remember the email’s purpose, which is to have relevant and helpful content for your audience.
3. No Clear Call to Action
The purpose of your email has to be visible and simple. This should be a part of your design as well as the actual action you want your audience to take. Therefore include a clear call to action in the upper portion of your emails, so your readers know what to do next.
4. You’re Sending the Wrong Content (Segmentation)
It’s a good idea to segment your customers, and personalise your content accordingly. If you are sending an offer that applies only to certain types of customers, make sure you just send it to the suitable ones. Segmentation makes your targeting more effective as it’s based on demographics, specific interests and past purchases. Mailchimp reports that segmented email campaigns get over nearly 15% higher open rates. Therefore it is important to get to know your email marketing platform well, so you’re able to segment your audience efficiently and not send the wrong content to your customers.
5. You’re Not Optimising for Mobile Devices
You might think that your B2B customers will be opening their emails on their work computers, however, recent research has shown that: 63% of B2B clients use their mobile devices for work. It’s therefore vital that you start optimising your email for mobile, both in terms of content as well as design. Test how your emails, as well as other content, looks on multiple devices before sending anything.
6. Bad Response Mechanism
Your call to action should be linked to a landing page that will simplify whatever it is you want your leads to do. For instance, if your promotional email is offering a free Ebook, then the link shouldn’t be to your homepage. You don’t want someone to have to search around your site to find the Ebook themselves. The page you take them to has to scream “free Ebook” in the headline to improve your conversion rates.
Planning Mistakes
Unrealistically high goals, as well as goals which don’t challenge you, can lead to marketing inefficiency. A lack of alignment between marketing goals and overall business aims can also mean your targets won’t be met. If the goals are too ambitious, it’s common for teams to get demotivated and feel like they can’t succeed from the start.And if the goals are too easy to achieve, individuals won’t feel challenged, decreasing their productivity. Your goals should be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely) as well as data-driven.
It’s also important to have back up plans and ideas of how to alter your strategy if it doesn’t work. This will avoid random actions and unaligned missions. Therefore your plan must be continuously adaptive, but with an outlined marketing process:
- Find your key metrics.
- Analyse past strategies and tactics
- Write up your plan
- Run tests and evaluate frequently
- Keep your managers and team members updated
The B2B marketing mistakes listed above can happen in large corporations as well as SMEs. You can drastically improve your marketing efforts by being aware of, and avoiding, these mistakes. Educating yourself in new marketing trends and keeping an open mind will be the key to your campaign’s success.