How to avoid the marketing mistakes many small to medium businesses make.
Without firm plans and robust measurement marketers and businesses lose focus. Rather than being focused on company goals and objectives, marketing becomes reactive. This leads to wasted time, effort and money and gets in the way of business growth.
The key marketing mistakes small to medium businesses make
A recent report by The Marketing Centre found that:
- 54% of respondents said that their business had no documented business plan
- Two thirds of SMEs have no way of detailing how marketing will contribute to achieving their goals - just 33% of businesses stated that they have a marketing action plan
- Only a third of respondents said they have a marketing plan which produces regular, timely marketing activities (implying efforts mainly comprise of ‘random acts of marketing’)
- Most businesses don’t have a robust, customer-centric marketing plan - only 28% of businesses said that they generate sufficient leads to achieve their business growth objectives
- Just 40% of businesses had a Customer Relationship Management system (suggesting that many SMEs aren’t tracking marketing and sales performances effectively)
- When using specialist marketing services only 27% of businesses set clear objectives, and just 41% measured the profitability of their customers
How to avoid these critical marketing mistakes.
You don’t need massive budgets or a big marketing team to be able to focus your marketing efforts where they will deliver the most benefit.
Here are some simple initiatives ('quick fixes') that can help get you off the ground when it comes to getting the most out of your marketing. Once you have the basics in place you can always enhance and refine them:
1. No clear marketing strategy or plan
As the statistics above show, many SMEs still operate without a formal marketing strategy or documented plan.
Without a strategy or measurable targets, marketing becomes reactive and unfocused (‘random acts of marketing’). This doesn’t just waste time money and effort, it also hampers growth.
What you can do about it:
Create a simple, documented strategy answering questions like:
- Who are you targeting?
- What’s your positioning?
- What’s the strategic goal (e.g. awareness, lead generation, retention etc)?
- How do you define success?
Or, to get things off the ground with a ‘quick fix,’ write a one-page plan (which you can review / enhance every quarter):
- Goal (e.g. 30 qualified leads/month)
- Target customer (Ideal Customer Profile)
- 3 main channels only
- Monthly budget
2. Poor understanding of the target audience
Often small to medium businesses have an ‘instinctive’ feel for their customers and base their marketing efforts around that without carrying out any real research. If businesses don’t have a good understanding of customers, targeting and messaging miss the mark, channels are chosen arbitrarily and engagement and conversions drop.
What you can do about it:
Take time out to speak to 5-10 real customers and ask simple questions like:
- Why they chose you
- What nearly stopped them
- What they searched for before buying
Use their responses to get a greater understanding of your customers and help create an Ideal Customer Profile.
A useful tool for creating and maintaining customer focus and improving customer engagement is user stories.
User stories create a simple description of something that a user of your product or service wants to achieve:
As a… (the who)
I want to… (the what)
So that… (the why)
User stories for our business (FMS) for a small business owner or Managing Director of a small to medium enterprise could be:
As a small business owner looking to grow my company
I want to find marketing support that’s affordable, clear, and effective
So that I can attract new customers, build trust, and achieve measurable growth without wasting money on ineffective marketing.
-
As a managing director of a small business
I want to explore options for outsourcing part or all of our marketing
So that I can benefit from experienced professionals and improve our marketing results.
3. Wasting marketing budget on wrong or ineffective channels
Where businesses don’t have a good understanding of their customers there’s a good chance they’ll invest in channels that simply don’t suit their audience. There’s also a temptation to try and ‘do everything’, spreading activity too thinly so that it has no meaningful impact (rather than targeting activity in a few key places where it’s likely to gain traction)
What you can do about it:
Try to identify where your best customers come from. Asking customers who get in touch with you where they heard about you / how they found you is an easy way of getting an initial steer. Focusing activity on your findings and targeting activity on the ‘most popular’ channels will help get you off the ground.
Give the initial activity time to bed in (e.g. 90 days). Monitor performance and invest where your activity looks to be getting results and pause any activity that hasn’t produced leads or sales.
4. Not tracking or using data wisely
Often small businesses don’t track marketing performance well or rely on vanity metrics (social media likes, basic profile or website visits) instead of real business outcomes like leads, conversions, and revenue.
This makes it difficult to invest in the activity that gets the best returns and, in the worst-case scenario, could mean that large chunks of marketing budget are being wasted.
What you can do about it:
Keep things simple by tracking 3 metrics per channel e.g.
- Cost per lead
- Conversion rate
- Revenue generated
Don’t worry too much about likes and impressions unless you’re sure that they are driving sales.
5. Inconsistent brand messaging
Where different channels (website, socials, ads, email) tell different stories, a brand can feel fragmented and appear inconsistent. This can confuse potential customers and weakens trust, especially in competitive markets.
What you can do about it:
Create a simple brand cheat sheet and share it with anyone creating content. In its simplest form it could include:
- What you do
- Who you help
- Key promise
- Tone (e.g. clear, friendly, expert)
Another way to help maintain consistency is to answer these three questions about your business. They will help determine a point of difference and focus for your marketing:
1. How does what you do / what you’re doing add value to customers’ lives?
2. What’s unique about you / what you do? (How do you stand out from the crowd?)
3. How do you communicate that in one simple, easy to understand phrase
Make sure that all communications reflect the answers to these questions to keep messaging clear and consistent.
Find out more about the critical elements of long-term brand building.
6. Chasing trends and ‘shiny objects’ (magpie syndrome)
It can be very tempting to jump onto every new social platform, tool or buzzword without checking that it aligns with your business goals first. Avoid getting distracted and focus on building, sustainable marketing activity that delivers results.
What you can do about it:
Use a ‘prove it first’ rule. For every new idea or trend ask, ‘Does this support our business goals?’ If the answer’s vague or ‘just because it’s trending’, that’s a red flag.
Only adopt a new platform or tactic if it does contribute to your goals and:
- You’re confident that your audience is already there
- You can test it for 30 days
- You can measure results clearly
7. Website mistakes
A slow, poorly optimised websites is not good for business. Poor website performance (speed, User Experience, SEO/GEO) means lost traffic and missed conversions.
What you can do about it:
Fix the top 3 basics:
- Aim for a mobile website loading speed of under 3 seconds
- Have clear headlines saying who you help and how
- Have one obvious call-to-action per page
8. Not getting the full benefit from AI & automation
Despite interest in AI, many small businesses haven’t yet adopted it for marketing workflows, data analysis, or personalised customer journeys. This leaves potential efficiency gains untapped, which competitors may exploit.
What you can do about it:
Get started by using AI in one specific area first e.g.
- For drafting emails or social posts
- Summarising customer feedback
- Improving ad copy / content
As you build confidence, experience and skills look at extending use of automation and AI into other areas of marketing.
9. Forgetting about customer retention
In many small businesses there’s often a heavy focus on winning new customers which can distract attention away from customer retention, loyalty and repeat business.
Losing focus on customer retention is damaging to business. Research shows that increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%*
*Source: Research carried out by Frederick Reicheld, Bain & Company.
What you can do about it:
Start off by building one simple retention habit:
- Monthly email with value (not sales)
- Follow-up after purchase
- Loyalty or referral incentive
Summary: How small and medium businesses can avoid the most common marketing mistakes
Surprisingly it’s not a lack of marketing budget, marketing tools or marketing ‘know how’ that are the biggest factors getting in the way of marketing success for SMEs. It’s a lack of focus.
Business that will enjoy the most marketing success are those who set clear goals, understand their customers, monitor and measure activity effectively, and build clear data-informed strategies (rather than carrying out ‘random acts of marketing’)
Final key takeaways.
As an SME you’ll outperform most of your competitors if you take these four steps:
- Put together a clear marketing plan (even if, in the first instance, it’s quite simple – you can always add to it / refine it later)
- Create an Ideal Customer Profile or Ideal Customer Profiles. Having a good understanding of your customers will pay dividends
- Monitor, measure and evaluate your marketing activity
- Speak clearly and consistently to a defined target audience