I’ve made all of these marketing mistakes so you don’t have to. Not only are these marketing mistakes a waste of time, but they can also become quite expensive. Especially if you have advertising dollars attached to your promotion, which I did. Social media ads and Google ads seem like they are inexpensive, but when everything is added up, they can be costly.
While my marketing failures are all around my handmade products, these mistakes can apply to any product, handmade or manufactured, product that you want to promote and sell. Even e-books.
Here are some product promotion marketing mistakes to avoid:
No Marketing Plan
When deciding to do a promotional event like a giveaway or discount, have a plan in place that covers all of the steps leading up to launch day. A marketing plan starts with a goal.
Do you know what you’re trying to achieve with the event? Are you looking for more subscribers? Do you want to sell more products? Will you be collecting names? Or just more traffic to your website or blog?
Until you can define your goal, you can’t make a marketing plan, and without a plan, how can you measure your results?
Marketing to the Wrong Audience
If you don’t know who buys your product or reads your blog, then you’ll end up marketing to the wrong group of people, which is a waste of time and money.
Start your marketing plan by finding out who your customers are. It’s important to know things like their age group, financial situation, gender, similar interests and more.
If you’re using social media or search engine ads, you can narrow the groups down to a small, select target. It’s better to market to a small group than a broad target, and you can’t know what that small group is until you figure out who your customers are. If you want to read more about digital marketing, check out this post.
Fail to Track Your Marketing Results
When you finish your ad campaign or promotional event, you won’t know if you were successful in reaching the right people until you see the analytics from the event. If it’s a social media ad or search engine ad, then the analytics are available to you on the dashboard.
If you’re tracking traffic on your website, you should be able to tell where the traffic went and where it came from. While some web hosts make you pay for upgraded analytics, most have a basic traffic analysis on the admin panel.
You may be able to get an idea of its success rate by how many products you sold, how many people signed up or how many social media shares you got for your blog post, but they won’t tell you where the traffic came from or how they found you.
Fail to Measure Your Marketing Results
From the traffic information you get on your website, the advertising campaign or email campaign dashboards, if you don’t measure these results and apply them to your next campaign, you might as well just throw the money away.
No matter how hard you plan, how much your target your audience, how far you track your statistics and how you measure your results, some campaigns are doomed to fail. However, all you can do is tweak it and start over. Sometimes the timing isn’t right. Sometimes events out of your control happen like a hurricane hitting the place where most of your customers come from, and sometimes, your product falls flat like a deflated balloon because no one wants a trick or treat bag in June.
While taking these promotional mistakes to avoid into consideration, also consider that you aren’t the first to make a mistake. If you want to see some spectacular marketing fails, then check out this story from Eventbrite in the U.K. You are not alone.
You might find the following books helpful in creating your marketing and promotion plans. Some of them are Kindle Unlimited, which means you can read them for free as long as you have a Kindle Unlimited membership. Try out Kindle Unlimited here.
The following ecommerce marketing books are all available to read for free with the Kindle Unlimited plan, but they are also inexpensive to own.
The 1-Page Marketing Plan – Allan Dib
How to Sell on Etsy with Facebook
The Book on Facebook Marketing
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Julie L. Cleveland 