Common Mistakes in Designing a Marketing Strategy

Every great marketing success starts with a solid strategy behind the scenes. At McCauley Marketing Services, developing a well-constructed and balanced marketing strategy is our starting point for each client, giving us a view of the big picture and a foundation for bringing that vision to life.

While creating your marketing strategy, though, there are crucial mistakes you can make that compromise your success down the road. From the minds of our marketing specialists, these top marketing strategy mistakes to avoid can help you get the most benefit from your strategy.

Not Segmenting Your Budget Well

Most companies have a set marketing budget, but in some cases, that’s where it stops. The problem is that if you have one overall budget you’re distributing across ten different campaigns throughout the year, it’s easy to overspend in one area and leave yourself with too little to make a difference in other areas. Or, you may mistakenly assume you should divide up your budget evenly across those ten campaigns, but it might be more effective to distribute your budget more strategically.  Instead, while deciding how to format your marketing strategy, break down your budget and decide how much you can invest in each campaign or marketing channel.

Planning Time-Sensitive Campaigns Poorly

Some of the campaigns or techniques in your marketing strategy may be time-sensitive, like a major event for your patients or customers. For items like this, it’s easy to underestimate how early you need to start working on the event or campaign.

When it comes to a major event, you must allow plenty of time to work out all the details for the event, design, and print or produce marketing materials, purchase contracts for ad space, and promote your event thoroughly. You also need to begin all of this early enough to give your attendees time to notice your ads and plan the event into their busy schedules. If you work out your marketing strategy to start preparing for your major event just a month or two in advance, you won’t get the best return on your investment.

Making Decisions Without Thorough Research

Especially if you’ve been in your business for many years, you may believe you know your target audience inside and out. You never know what you might be missing, though, and who might have great potential if they weren’t left out of your marketing.

As you develop your marketing strategy, you need to do thorough research to find out who your target audience is and identify the most successful ways to reach them. Making your decisions based on assumptions and gut feelings or based on “what we’ve always done” or “what everyone else is doing” is a recipe for missing out on tremendous growth. Don’t forget to continuously assess your marketing data too to see what’s working and what isn’t so you can adjust as you go along.

Becoming a Jack of All Trades

Most people think being a “jack of all trades” is a good thing, but they forget that the full saying is, “jack of all trades, master of none.” Yes, a good marketing strategy needs variety, and you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket. If you try to do everything, though, you’ll spread your budget so thin that you won’t be able to make a meaningful impact in any of your campaigns or marketing channels. The key is finding a healthy balance with the right amount of variety.

Not Establishing a Data Tracking Plan

Data is one of the most vital tools you have in your marketing toolkit. You can always track how new leads are hearing about your business, how many people are visiting certain pages or clicking on ads, and so on. This data is the only true way to know if your marketing strategy is working and to make reliable, predictably profitable adjustments. While developing your marketing strategy, you need to create a plan for tracking each marketing channel you’re investing in and then comparing it to the profits received.

How McCauley Marketing Services Can Help

We don’t mean to be pessimistic, but the fact is that it’s easy to make marketing strategy mistakes that end up costing you money or making you lose out on new growth. If you’d prefer to leave the strategy to the professionals, we’re here for you. Call McCauley Marketing Services today to schedule a meeting with our team.