Archimedia Studios

Common Marketing Mistakes

Common Marketing Mistakes

1. Not being prepared with a marketing plan, USP and budget.

2. Targeting everyone instead of focusing on a specific target audience.

3. Misrepresenting your experience and making unsubstantiated claims.

4. Being inconsistent with your marketing message.

5. Ignoring your existing paying clients and only marketing to the unknown.

6. Not listening to feedback on your marketing activities.

7. Following the competition instead of creating your own place in the market.

8. Not following up with leads quickly.

9. Not editing/proofreading your copy before going public.

10. Underestimating customer service and the power of word of mouth.

11. Not having business cards on you at all times.

Online Marketing Mistakes

12. Forgetting to test your site across various platforms and browsers.

13. Not updating your site design or content, ever.

14. Assuming SEO will take care of itself.

15. Ignoring the needs of your target audience when writing your site content.

16. Not including easy-to-find contact information.

17. Blanketing your business web site with ads that distract from your core message.

18. Copying content from competitors’ web sites.

19. Not providing an informative and engaging About page.

Email Marketing Mistakes

20. Sending messages to people who have not opted in.

21. Selling your subscribers’ contact information.

22. Blatantly spamming by sending unrelated and unwanted messages.

23. Not testing HTML emails in many types of email clients.

24. Making it hard to subscribe or to unsubscribe.

25. Not including a specific call to action in every email.

26. Not testing email personalization to avoid <firstname> tags.

27. Over packing your emails with competing messages.

28. Underestimating your subject line.

29. Leaving the copywriting as an afterthought.

30. Ignoring your statistics and failing to tailor your messages accordingly.

Social Media Marketing Mistakes

31. Ignoring your online reputation.

32. Forgetting it’s a marathon, not a sprint and cramming in too much, too fast.

33. Not updating your profiles regularly and keeping them consistent.

34. Focusing on sales instead of forming real relationships.

35. Overlooking the importance of conversations.

36. Not having a recognizable image across social media.

37. Not updating your blog on a regular basis.

38. Trying to be everywhere, all the time.

Alyssa Gregory

Reality in Advertising…

Reality in Advertising (Reeves 1961) Reeves laments that the U.S.P. is widely misunderstood and gives a precise definition in three parts:

  1. Each advertisement must make a proposition to the consumer. Not just words, not just product puffery, not just show-window advertising. Each advertisement must say to each reader: “Buy this product, and you will get this specific benefit.”
  2. The proposition must be one that the competition either cannot, or does not, offer. It must be unique—either a uniqueness of the brand or a claim not otherwise made in that particular field of advertising.
  3. The proposition must be so strong that it can move the mass millions, i.e., pull over new customers to your product.

Some good current examples of products with a clear USP are:

  • Head & Shoulders: “You get rid of dandruff”
  • Olay: “You get younger-looking skin”

Some unique propositions that were pioneers when they were introduced:

  • Domino’s Pizza: “You get fresh, hot pizza delivered to your door in 30 minutes or less — or it’s free.”
  • FedEx: “When your package absolutely, positively has to get there overnight”
  • M&M’s: “Melts in your mouth, not in your hand”
  • Wonder Bread: “Wonder Bread Helps Build Strong Bodies 12 Ways”

Developing a Unique Selling Plan (USP)

What is a USP?

A USP is one of the fundamental pieces of any solid marketing campaign. Simply stated, it’s a summary of what makes your business unique and valuable to your target market. It answers the question: How do your business services benefit your clients better than anyone else can?

In my previous post, I suggested replacing your traditional business plan with three key pieces, one of which is your USP. This is because a USP can give a great deal of clarity to your business model, what your company does and why you do it. It can define your business and most important business goals in just a sentence.

Successful USPs can be used as a company slogan and should be incorporated into all of your marketing activities.

OK, now that we’re clear on what a USP is and why it’s so valuable, let’s start creating one.

Step 1: Describe Your Target Audience

Before you can even start marketing your services, you need to know who you are targeting. In this step, you want to be as specific as possible. For example, if you are a Web developer with a CMS expertise, instead of targeting anyone who needs helping building or modifying a CMS, you may identify your target client as a small business owner who is looking for a developer well-versed in MODx to customize his/her site.

Step 2: Explain the Problem You Solve

From your prospective clients’ perspective, what is the individual need or challenge they face that your business can solve for them?

Step 3: List the Biggest Distinctive Benefits

In this step, list 3-5 of the biggest benefits a client gets from choosing to work with you that they could not get from someone else (i.e., what sets you apart from your competition). Again, thinking from the clients’ perspective, these benefits should explain why your services are important to them and why they would choose you over another provider.

Step 4: Define Your Promise

A big part of a successful USP is making a pledge to your clients. While this can be implied instead of spelled out in your USP, write down this promise you make to your clients in this step.

Step 5: Combine and Rework

Once you’ve completed steps 1-4, take all of the information you listed and combine it into one paragraph. There should be some recurring ideas and thoughts, so you’ll want to start merging statements and rewriting in a way that flows and makes sense.

Step 6: Cut it Down

In this step, take your paragraph from step 5 and condense it even more into just a sentence. You want your final USP to be as specific and simple as possible.

Take your time while doing this exercise and do several drafts over the course of a week until you arrive at your final USP. A fresh mind and perspective is essential, so I would recommend doing this at the beginning of your day versus at the end when you are tired. You also may want to come back and do this exercise again, once you try out your USP for a while, or if anything changes with your business.

Designer Insights Series – The Brain

Design is powerful because of the way our brain processes visuals. We might think of vision working by our eyes pulling in images and projecting them in the back of our mind. If this were the case then there would no be design or art. There are in fact 30 areas in the back of your brain that process different aspects of the image. The various vision processing areas of the brain are individually recreating the design. So, in a way, the viewer is also an artist. In reality, design and art stimulate the mind more than a realistic image would do. Which is why it affects us differently. Randomly placing objects on a screen do not create the same reaction. There must be purpose to the visual distortion/arrangement for the mind to pick up.

It would be nearly impossible to lock down all the various styles of design that are out there. Sure, we can categorize them into bigger buckets and generalize with words like “clean,” or “grunge,” and designers certainly understand what kind of design to expect from those words. Although at the surface there is a difference between them, at their very core the brain is being stimulated by them in the same way.

Knowledge is Power

Great artists, like Monet, were experts at employing principles like peak shift into their work. Although, I’m not sure he ever had to present designs to a client like we do today. Sometimes it seems like a lack of (design) understanding gives the client an upper hand. The difference between you and your client’s neighbor’s friend’s 13-yr-old kid with a copy of Photoshop is that they have to pay you more. Which really means that, unfortunately, to many clients you are both the same.

Experience and your portfolio of work certainly matter. But each client is completely different with how they judge design. Paul Rand described business clients as this:

“It is their uninformed, unfocused preferences or prejudices, their likes or dislikes that too often determine the look of things. Yet, much of the time, they are not even discriminating enough to distinguish between good and bad, between trendy and original, nor can they always recognize talent or specialized skills.”

In the end it is up to the designer to communicate the decisions they made in creating their solution. Understanding some of these principles won’t help you decide what style of design to use, or what colors are best. There are differences on cultural levels or project goals that affect things like that. However, knowing what these principles are and why they work will help you create effective designs and hopefully help to give you (the designer) some of that power back. More to follow…

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