What's the most common marketing mistake you see?

Efri · 1 min read

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One, trying to run a business the way influencers run their brand. It doesn't work the same way. You're selling know-how, or a product, or whatever it is. They're selling who they are and their life. It is not the same audience.

And even if you're targeting the same people, the reason they go and see them and the reason they come to you is very different. So copying that playbook gets you attention from people who were never going to buy anything.

Two, finding reasons to implement best practices blindly. Best practices are meant to be educated guesses. So if you know that talking about yourself a lot means people won't buy, fine. But that doesn't mean you don't talk about yourself at all.

People take a directional rule and turn it into a law, and then they're stuck following something that was only ever a starting point.

A few more:

Measuring nothing, then having opinions about everything. No tracking, so every decision is a feeling.

Changing channels every six weeks. Nothing gets to the point where it would have worked.

Writing from inside the company. Messaging built on what the company wants to say rather than what customers would buy.

Confusing being busy with doing marketing. Lots of posting, lots of tools, lots of activity, and nobody's asked whether any of it moves anything.

Fixing the wrong end. Rebuilding the product when the problem was that nobody understood the sentence on the homepage.