In todays landscape its essential that composers have a strong understanding of how to market themselves and their services. However, marketing is only as effective as its implementation; anyone can figure out basic marketing and have a go at it, but that usually leads to some of the mistakes we are going to talk about in today’s blog post.
Read on to discover some of the 5 most common marketing mistakes and how to avoid them.
1. Lack of research
When you first start thinking of a marketing campaign, the first thing you need to be doing is research. Research absolutely everything, from your target audience right through to who your competitors are. Can you do what they are doing but better? Is there a gap in the market which you can fill? They are just a couple of questions you can ask yourself when it comes to market research.
As the world becomes more and more competitive, market research can be the difference between you having a successful marketing campaign and an unsuccessful one.
By understanding your target audiences demands, what they want to see improved and thinking of possible solutions to their gripes, will allow you to craft your product in the exact manor necessary for success.
Never underestimate the power of research and neglect it at your own peril.
Thorough research is an essential ingredient of a successful marketing strategy.
2. Trying to appeal to too many people
Campaigns can now be highly targeted thanks to new tools and platforms. You shouldn't use a scattershot approach in your marketing campaigns. With thanks to analytic tools on websites and social media, you can narrow down your target audience to such significant effect nowadays. You can get clear, thorough data to help you really narrow down who you are making your product for, and in turn this will help you see an increase in sales.
The analytic tools that are available to you offers you an indication of which gender, age group, and geographic area are most likely to interact with your product, and you can even narrow down your targeting to a certain social media platform and the optimum time of day to promote to your audience. Combining research findings with data-driven targeting is a winning combination.
Its essential to narrow your audience so that you aren't trying to appeal to too-broad an audience.
3. Hesitancy to invest in marketing
When you are initially starting a new business or just trying to set something up yourself one of the first hurdles most people come across are opportunities to invest in marketing. This could be down to the fact that you think the money should be spent elsewhere or maybe you just don’t have the room in your budget.
If the money is available, you should rarely pass up on the opportunity to invest in marketing. The results would speak for itself. Invest 10% of your budget into marketing and you would have wished you invested 25%.
Like we mentioned previously, you may not have the money to invest in marketing. Luckily there are plenty of ways to get funding for small businesses, so you are able to invest in your marketing. One such way would be from a website called “helpmusicians.org.uk.”
Make sure that you have a plan for your marketing from day 1 and don't hesitate to invest in it. As the saying goes: "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now."
4. Failure to track performance
Technology has come so far and has made our life a lot easier. This is especially true when it comes to tracking the performance of your particular advertising campaigns or how many leads you are turning into customers via your website.
Usually people will use their analytic data to craft a marketing campaign they think would do well, but afterwards they do not track properly how their campaign is performing. This will then not allow them to make improvements to their campaign or make amends in future campaigns. You can track every part of your marketing campaigns with the aid of modern technology, so there is no reason you should not know where you have succeeded and where you can improve.
Before you launch a campaign, make sure you have clearly defined performance targets in place, so you always know how your campaign is doing. Otherwise, you'll be wasting money on efforts that may be put to better use.
Failure to track performance can result in wasted budgets and a lack of clarity on why/how things didn't go the plan.
5. Ignoring SEO
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is such an important thing when it comes to digital marketing, as good SEO will put you right at the top of search engine results. People will rarely ever go past the top three results on a Google search, so it is imperative that you focus on it. A lot of people will put SEO to the back of their mind and prioritise other things instead.
SEO can be quite daunting to begin with and that could be another reason why people put it on the back burner, but just understanding the basics to begin with can genuinely make all the difference. Once you understand the basics you can begin to improve your knowledge on it, slowly but surely.
Marketing is a difficult task at the best of times, and it is so easy to make mistakes whilst you are doing it, especially if you are a small team or if you are doing it by yourself. But hopefully you are now aware of some of the common mistakes people make when it comes to marketing.
We hope you have enjoyed this blog post!
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