I made this list because I was a self inflicted victim the below marketing “mishaps” and it almost cost me everything. I simply created this list so you don’t have to learn the hard way!

So let’s get started!

1. Not Being Involved With Your Marketing Efforts.

As a small business owner you should not completely outsource you marketing. You should learn immediately effective marketing strategies for your business. Do not think that an ad, graphic design, or web-design company has the answers. They can and will create beautiful ads and sites for you, often based on your vision, but you probably don’t have the budget for branding, and that sadly is what you just paid for.

2. Creating Print Ads Without Any Marketing Power.

Do not create postcards, flyers, or brochures without a strong offer and a call to action. You must give the “reader” some reason to take action, immediately. Add a deadline, add a free gift, give them a powerful reason for them to pick up the phone, stop by your storefront, or visit your site.
3. Not Keeping Stats On Mailings or Other Marketing Campaigns.

One of the most important lessons in marketing is knowing your numbers. You must have in place some sort of tracking device set up to know how many “mailers” sent to what list produced how many conversions. Whether you set up an independent phone number, lead page, or tracking “word” printed on the postcard, you can never build a great campaign, if you don’t know your numbers.

4. Not Having A Follow Up Campaign in Place.

Before you send out anything, make sure you have some sort of follow up campaign in place. Think about it this way. You have a small captivated audience, wanting to learn more about you and your business, and there is nothing but the chirping of crickets.

5. Sending Your Message Out ONLY Once To The Same List.

Never think that you can “touch” a list just once with your offer and expect great results. Oftentimes. you will be more successful sending the SAME “offer” out to the SAME list MULTIPLE times vs sending ONE offer just ONCE to multiple people or businesses.

6. Not Actively Capturing or Following Up With Leads

You must in everything that you do, always try to CAPTURE and FOLLOW UP with leads. Do this every morning before anything else. Say to yourself, “Who has my money in their pocket?” Pick up the phone, make a few calls, get something started. Believe me, I know that for many small business owners running the whole show can get hectic, but don’t be confused, everything else can wait. Today, and everyday you must do everything you can to actively make sales.

7. Not Keeping Up With Current Clients.

This is the bad one! If your business does not have a plan to keep up with your clients, then drop everything now and get it started! There are a couple of sayings about this but my personal favorite is, “It takes years to win a customer and only seconds to lose one.” and I’ll just throw this one in too, “It is 10 times easier to sell to a current client then to find a new one.” and oh yeah, how could I forget the “Golden Grail” of marketing? The most important asset in YOUR business is YOUR list.

8. Putting All Your Eggs Into One Basket

Never stop trying to learn new ways to market your business. Become familiar with the marketing triangle: the right message to the right market in the right media. If you want to learn more about this, then I recommend reading all of Dan Kennedy’s Books.

9. Time Management Must Involve Marketing and Most Importantly Implementation

You must set aside time EVERY day to educate yourself, create, and implement. I used to say that your business is nothing without marketing, but since then I have added that it is nothing without implementation.

10. Failure to Realize the Significance of Social Media Marketing Strategies.

I used to spend a lot of time explaining why Video, Facebook, YouTube, and the other social media platforms are important. I really don’t do that anymore, though. Trying to optimize my time management, and really, there’s enough information out there already.

I started with this list of ten, and wow, as much as I hate to admit it, I could probably write a book. HMMMMmmmmm

Anyway, I encourage you to take just one part of this list run with it. Don’t try to cover all bases immediately. I have yet to meet the person or business, including myself, that follows to a tee all the above. It is a good list to get you going in the right direction, and once you hit 10 just give me a call.

First off, I know that most web-design companies do an amazing job at creating beautiful sites. They may also add in functionality regarding search engine optimization strategies. So, what I am really trying to say is that this article is not in any attempt to bash these web-desgin companies because they do in fact create your site based on your vision.

When web-design first became a reality, some of the most effective sites were those that were visually perfect. The web image was the sales pitch, added with some pretty words and walaa!

The problem with this formula today though is that with all the other pretty web sites out there, how can your business compete?

The answer is so simple, you may get mad at yourself, but I promise you that I learned this lesson the hard and expensive way.

The answer is marketing. Yes that’s it, marketing, internet style, but using the same old tried and true ways of capturing leads and getting customers to your door to buy your stuff.

Think about it this way. If you send out mailers or postcards they should contain a a great offer, possibly a free something, a call to action, and a deadline. All these components drive the prospect into buying mode. If you mail your postcards to your list once, don’t get discouraged with a small reply. With direct mail, it has been proven that you must touch this list at least a few times. Someone once told me that seven touches was the magic number, but the point it, your mailing campaign is rarely successful if it is sent only once.

So you may be asking, how does this apply to web-design and how can a small businesses compete with the corporate giants with massive marketing and advertising budgets.

Your site should emulate your most successful marketing campaign. You should have a great offer, and give away free stuff, not junk, great free information, you should have some sort of call to action, and create deadlines on your offers. Above all, you must have an opt in box where your web-visitor can enter their information. Then on the tail end, an internet style marketing campaign, to retouch this visitor with future information and offers. This is how you build a great list to add to your current client list, and in any business the most valuable asset is your list.

There are many ways today to affordably  and effectively add all of these components to your site. If you are building a new site, I would recommend using the word-press platform as Google likes it and it had the built in blogs. Google and other search engines look for new content so thats where blogs help. I would also recommend you use social media like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube and perhaps most importantly Video.

When I started this article, I wanted to share a lot of great NEW information about Video Marketing, namely how it can be used as a powerful internet marketing tool, and how it helps with Search Engine Optimization, but I quickly became unsatisfied with this idea because most of the facts have been around for a long, long time. If you do a little online research about it, you will quickly be inundated with thousands of proven statistics. What many of these sites don’t mention is that the video and article campaigns must have true marketing value. In other words, do these video “campaigns” actually convert a prospect into a client or buyer.
You see, the premise of using video to increase SEO is that after doing a little keyword research regarding your business or offer you should title your articles and videos using those keywords. After uploading your videos and articles to as many sites, blogs, and podcasts you can get your hands on, you may notice some results in your ranking on Google. I used to upload videos for my clients one account at a time. It took forever! Now, there are businesses, including my own, that provide multiple video and article upload services, or you can independently purchase these programs yourself.
If you are a business owner or professional practice owner I understand if you would rather hire a company to do this work for you, and here is where I would like to offer you my professional advice. You can hire a company to optimize your web-sites ranking on Google (this is really the easy part) The hard part is creating videos that are interesting or compelling enough for a visitor to click though to your web site. Just like any direct sales marketing campaign, the most successful videos for businesses are those that tell your story. Why you do what you do, why you are passionate about your product or service, and always, ALWAYS use video testimonials whenever possible. In the video world, we call this storytelling and i know only a handful of videographers and video editors that can pull it off effectively. Your videos should emulate your most valuable direct sales marketing campaigns, and they must have a powerful call to action.
Many professional video companies know only video and have little experience with marketing, so you must be diligent on finding a company that has a proven track record in both professions.
And finally I will end with this. If you have a brochure style web-site that offers no free information, or a call to action, and most importantly and opt in box where visitors can enter their information then don’t even bother optimizing your web-site, or even delving into video or internet marketing because that is the equivalent of having your business door locked. Video and Internet marketing is about getting leads, right? Window shoppers don’t pay the bills.