By Marita Greenidge

You’ve been spending lots of money on marketing but for some reason sales are not coming in the door. Why, oh why is your marketing not working? You’ve tried newspaper ads, online ads, you are even trying that “new age” social media stuff, yet nothing!

Don’t despair! You might be making a few mistakes that with some correction will show an improvement to your bottom line.

Here are a few common mistakes entrepreneurs make when it comes to marketing:

You forget marketing is done to drive sales

You therefore spend way too much time (and money) on the aesthetic aspects of your promotional material than you do on ensuring that material is useful. A fancy flash introduction may look really cool but oftentimes it takes too long to load. Your customers don’t want to wait; they want the information right now. The time your site takes to load, they probably disappeared to another site. Potential sale lost.

With printed brochures one can easily neglect content and focus on eye-catching design. Your brochure is meant to inform the customer, not decorate someone’s table or counter. You want a solid call to action with contact details and an explanation of the benefits your product offers. Your goal is to encourage a sale. (As a side note on brochures, many persons tend to make the mistake of listing product features without a clear link to the benefits for the customer. The customer always wants to know “what’s in it for me?” Don’t forget to answer that question.)

You forgot to define your target market

Locals or tourists, business professionals or doctors, older or younger, sports enthusiasts or gardeners? Who does your product most benefit and what are they reading or watching? If you sell hip, chic, trendy shoes then you probably don’t want to place an ad on 900 AM no matter how cheap the rates are. If you intend to cater to the tourist market then your ad would be better placed on barbados.org or in the Nation Explore magazine than in the regular daily paper. If you’re selling art you probably want to get on Corrie Scott’s blog and online magazine. The idea here is to get your promotional material where your target market has a higher probability of seeing you.

You thought social media was the way to go but forgot it meant being social

Social media is great for building relationships which go a long way in encouraging repeat purchases. You heard this so you set up a Facebook & Twitter page. Unfortunately you forgot that someone needed to monitor the pages and interact regularly with fans and followers. You also forgot that posting interesting stuff frequently could keep fans and followers constantly coming back for more. You lament that you don’t get the big deal with Facebook and Twitter; it’s not working for you.

Facebook and Twitter are great ways to get customer insight for product development. If I were an artist considering launching a new suite of digital reproductions, my fans could let me know if I were on the right track with the pieces chosen. If I were a spice producer, I could give away free recipes that used my spices. When users made the dishes I’d encourage them to share their experience with other fans to incite more sales!

These are just a few reasons you may not be getting the bang for your marketing bucks. Hope this helps place you on a path to rapid sales generation. If not, see me for a consult :-). 

By Corey Graham 2.0

Today, whenever you hear about social media and business, it usually tends to be in a positive light. Tech savvy marketers and entrepreneurs are all evangelizing the benefits of social media. However, I wanted to take a look at the mistakes that could cripple your business.

Shouting at Your Potential and Current Customers

This is one I put high on the list because it is fundamental mistake most people make with implementing their social media marketing. Social media is about conversation and it works best when you are being conversational. The humans beings you are trying to reach enjoy good thoughtful interaction. Using social media to blast persons with your marketing messages and abusing their inbox with a constant influx of sales copy type emails is a quick way to erode the possibility of having a building a long term successful relationship with your customers.

This is following on from the point above. I know you might not intentionally set out insult your audience, however if you are not taking to time to listen and understand your audience you might very likely underestimating their intelligence i.e. their opinions and ideas do not matter. If you are doing that, then you are very likely to insult them as you try to engage them through social media. Insulted people are bad for business.

This is important because each social network / medium has its own peculiarities. In some cases it might mean there might be a different standard of communications certain types of messages and in others it might mean you have a different type of person interacting with you on the different networks. Whatever it is, its important to understand the difference and communicate accordingly.

Now this is a shortcut, but don't overdo it. Interacting with human like a robot is simply not going to cut it. There are a few situations where an automated message would be extremely helpful to everyone involved. However if you overuse automated messages, it can easily hurt you, and very badly. The worse case with this situation is the social network flags you as a spammer and deletes you.

People new to social media get carried away trying to attract new friends and followers not realising that their current list is where the gold mind is really located. The people already on your list can attract many new followers / followers by sharing with others how great you are. The thing is though; if you are not paying attention to them and making sure they think you are great! It takes just one of them to start the movement! Work smart!

Hope this opens your eyes to managing your social media marketing strategy more effectively. 

By Kathy-Ann Fletcher

If Location, location, Location is the real estate agents’ mantra, then perseverance, perseverance, perseverance should be the entrepreneur’s refrain. While location means everything in the sale of a property, perseverance is instrumental in the success of a business.

It is easy to give up at the first hurdle – throw our hands up at the first mistake and say ‘oh well it’s not meant to be’. However, if we look back at some of the most successful people, their achievements are their persistence in the face of mistakes. Instead they will try again in a different way.

It’s not as easy as it sounds to persevere when you make what may seem a crippling mistake but I provide a few tips to inspire you to persist in the face of disappointment.

1.       Retain your enthusiasm – If you lose your enthusiasm for what you are doing, it’s easy to get disheartened and walk away from your dream. Enthusiasm is the drive you need to keep you on the path to your accomplishments.

2.       Trust your instincts – Your ideas are your gateway to achieving success. When you have found that one that makes you happy trust your instincts and keep going as long as it takes to be successful.

3.       Master your craft – Mistakes are easy to make when you are new to a particular field, so minimise these risks and recover from these blunders, take steps to become more knowledgeable about your area.

4.       Be dedicated – Staying dedicated is hard but the rewards pay off tremendously. Jane Austen made the biggest mistake – a bad first impression – however, she persevered to become a revered author.

5.       Take it step-by-step – Henry Ford made a lot of mistakes but learnt from them and in sharing the secret to his success explained that perseverance consists of approaching your business one small job at a time. That is the source of many of our mistakes we try to break off more than we can chew and often become overwhelmed. In that case the answer is not to give up but to resize your operations so that you are taking your steps in an order that you are able to handle.

I end by saying on the road to success remember these three words: Perseverance, perseverance, perseverance.