Posted on February 16th, 2010Most successful startups and small businesses have a pretty clear idea of what their product does and who it was designed for, otherwise they wouldn’t have succeeded. They have an established base of customers and a stable cash flow.
But a lot of companies don’t have a really strong marketing plan for acquiring new customers and keeping the old ones active. And it is quite hard to make one – it requires a lot of research and smart advertising (which means not only buying banner and ad space, but also testing different types of sales letters and landing pages, to find the variations that are the most successful at converting visitors into buyers).
This is why marketing perfection can never be acquired – because it is constantly changing and you have to learn new and different ways of advertising, and there’s only so much time in a day for work. If you and your business persist at learning and using the best marketing techniques, you will soon be in the top percentage of companies, simply because your competitors didn’t do the same.
The first lesson you’ll have to learn is to stop making mistakes and extract any useful information from the ones you already made. Mistakes waste time, and you waste even more time thinking you shouldn’t have done it. But it already happened, so analyzing, then forgetting it is the only effective way to go.
Here are a few of the most basic mistakes you should avoid in your business:
1. Inconsistent branding.
It’s pretty common for new companies to have a few marketing campaigns that seemingly contradict each other. For example, a company whose main niche was database software last year now focuses entirely on content management systems. But people still see the old ads and think it is a database company. There are lots of other reasons why this might happen, and it often doesn’t matter. The important thing is to plan and implement a branding plan and have a clear image for your potential customers about what your company does.
2. Putting all eggs in one basket.
Let’s say a company signed a profitable contract with a big corporation. Now they have work for a few years, and the income is guaranteed. Many will just start focusing on that project alone and forget that after the contract is over, they will be out of work. Hell, maybe the big client will not be satisfied or will have financial difficulties and will have to cancel the order. What will the small business do then? Point is, you have to have alternative income sources and projects to work on (preferably ones that can be easily scaled up as soon as you have the manpower and resources).
3. Working alone.
I don’t mean alone as a person, although there are a lot of one-man operations out there and they’re pretty good. I mean alone as in without any business partners. When your business is small you have to accept whatever help you can get, and if another company offers you to team up on a project and split the profit, think twice before refusing. If you successfully complete the project, you’ll still be profitable and your joint client’s name will be in your portfolio. Of course, there can always be problems, but if you plan everything correctly, they can be avoided. And you shouldn’t necessarily wait for other to contact you. You should contact other companies in the field if you have something that can be profitable for both of you.
4. Taking on everything at once.
Unless you have the resources, this is just not feasible. Even using everything from a busy schedule to complex automation tools you can’t work on all your projects at once. Not without being extremely slow, that is. And I know most entrepreneurs have a lot of projects and ideas in their heads and computers. But you have to learn to execute one thing at a time, and when you have the money, you can work on 2-3, then more projects at once. Just don’t do it in the beginning, have some patience.
5. Not experimenting enough.
A small business has the ability to be flexible and experiment with everything, from billing systems to office layout. And you absolutely must take advantage of that. Try new, better ways of working on your projects, different ways to communicate with your customers, different website layouts, and other things. Test, test, test and preferably never stop, as you will always find something that works better than the previous thing.
Of course, there are a lot of other obvious mistakes that a lot of businesses make, but not all of them can make or break the company. You will most probably make at least one of them, and the only way to go, as I said above, is to analyze the mistake, extract all useful data and forget it, but remember not to make it ever again.