Big brand or budding business, your marketing is going to play a huge part in the success or failure of your business.

With a limited budget and high stakes, it is not always easy to know which direction your marketing should go. Should you use SEO or social media? Should you use an agency or do things in house?

Some questions don’t have an easy answer and highly depend on the situation. Yet, there are some things that are just not going to work no matter what. Mistakes that every marketer should avoid at all costs, in other words.

In this article, we will point out a few of the most common mistakes that businesses make with their marketing.

1 – Not leveraging the right platform

There are so many places where your audience is lurking. If you want to reach them you have to know which one. Many will be using social media. Are they on Snapchat? Facebook? Instagram?

This is what you need to find out. You can’t possibly use all the different social media channels or you’ll wipe out your budget.

Youtube is becoming a huge opportunity these days and if you are not using that then you are making a mistake. If you are using video templates that resonate with your audience then you’ll see some success. Ignore video and you may not.

You may find that your best avenue for acquisition comes from doing SEO. If this is the case, then using social media is not the way to go.

Do the research to understand where your audience is and then you can reach them effectively.

2 – Retargeting everyone

A hugely effective strategy to acquire customers is to retarget them. It is said that a person needs to see an offer seven times before they buy. That means that there is a very small chance that a first time visitor to your site is going to buy.

Using retargeting is a great way to get your offer in front of them seven times or more. Yet, at the same time, not everybody should be retargeted. It costs money to have a huge list of targets and if you are sending ads to people that weren’t interested to begin with then you’ve wasted that money.

Make sure to only target people who have met a certain criteria when they visited your site. Time they spent on page can be tracked as well as how many pages they viewed and links they clicked. Those are the people that showed interest and can be retargeted. Ignore the people who clicked back after just a few seconds.

3 – Using too much of your budget on acquisition

This one might seem confusing as we have mentioned the importance of acquisition several times. Yes, it is very important, but it is only one part of the funnel.

If too much of your budget is spent on the acquisition then there are other parts of the sales funnel that are underutilized.

Don’t ignore other areas where money needs to be spent. It can be from email marketing to get those visitors to your site onto your list so when they are ready to buy you can make it easy for them. For example, a very effective way to grow revenue is by using a shopping cart reminder. When people haven’t finished their checkout then a slight prod may get them to do so.

Repeat visitors are much more valuable to your business than always trying to draw people to your site. Use some of the budget to convert those visitors into leads and then customers.

4 – Not using the data

Raw data is hard to understand and boring even when you do understand what you are looking at. Yet, understanding the data is how to paint a picture of your marketing strategy so you can see where to focus your attention.

Make an effort to have the data processed in a way that it can be used and understood so you can make better decisions about your marketing.

Without the data, then you are always just shooting in the dark.

5 – Not understanding trends

In the same vein of understanding data, you need to see what the current trends are to be able to pivot your strategy.

If you notice your competitors are using more user generated content on their social media and are seeing high engagement, then you need to be doing the same. Things happens fast and new ideas are taking off so be ahead of the curve when you can.