We all know that marketing is essential for all businesses, both start-ups and existing businesses. The level at which the business is determines the kind of marketing and marketing techniques that would be appropriate. No matter what kind of business you start, you are bound to make some marketing mistakes. Knowing when and how to invest in marketing for your business is often the key ingredient to your start-up’s success. 

Here are 5 common marketing mistakes that every startup makes — and how you can avoid them.

1. Spending money on ‘big marketing’ too quickly

You have grand plans of taking the industry by storm and decide you want to use a captivating ad or a mind-blowing campaign. This is good, but you might want to hold your horses! You don’t want to blow your budget this early, do you? Start slow…

If you do make the mistake of spending too much too soon, the worst thing that could happen is nothing. The next worst thing that could happen is that your marketing turns out to be a huge success — but you’re incapable of meeting the resulting new demand. Take the time to test your audience. Don’t gamble. Find out who your buyers are and spend small amounts of money on hyper-targeted marketing. Focus on content marketing and work PR angles, and use free videos to spread your brand message. Test various platforms a little at a time and not just pump money into one gigantic ad campaign

2. Spending too much time on perfecting your brand

Too many startups want to change their name early on and completely rebrand, or revise their website design over and over but this is a waste of limited funds when done too early.

Then there is the excessive promotion of the brand. Hyper-focusing on your brand, particularly on social media, is another no-no. if your target audience sees that you post too frequently on social media without providing anything of real value, they could tune out or even unfollow your brand.

The best approach is to run a lean startup method, which provides a scientific approach to creating and managing startups and getting the desired product to customers’ hands faster. Don’t delay launching a website just to get the copy or design ideally. Once you’ve launched and started rolling, you can pick up more information and make those tweaks and changes from a much more stable position. You can also learn more about what your followers want to hear from you regarding your brand and your industry, so you don’t drown them in your launch.

3. Giving everyone a voice in marketing decisions

Too many hands spoil the broth. When it comes to marketing, everyone seems to have an opinion. The more people you invite to have a say in the marketing, the longer it will take to finalize anything. Recognize that you can never please everyone.

4. Chasing competitors

This is very common. Every business has competitors, even monopolies. Part of building a business entails recognising what your competitors are doing, taking cues from it, learning from it and finding ways to do it better than them. Do not get caught in the trap of replicating their efforts in order to get more attention. Not only will you create more noise that customers will grow tired of, but you’ll have no idea how effective that marketing strategy has been in the first place. Can you really trust that your competitor is doing everything right all the time?

5. Failing to measure results

When you do spend money on marketing, you need to track everything you do. If you don’t know what kind of traction you got from a specific campaign, you’ll have no idea if you made a return on your investment or not.

Every campaign you launch online should use tracking codes/pixels or unified threat management (UTM) codes. Print ads should use unique phone numbers, special discount codes and custom URLs. Never be afraid to ask customers how they heard about you, and always have a way to link every customer back to a campaign.

These mistakes are completely preventable. If you do make them, it’s not the end of the road. You just need to make sure you retool, rethink and relaunch your marketing strategy as you move forward. As long as you prepare accordingly and learn from your mistakes, you can move on to better strategies and drive your business to success.