Is Your Small Business Wasting Marketing Dollars?

Small businesses don’t often have unlimited budgets, and this means it’s essential that any expense is a smart one. This is especially important when it comes to marketing. Certain marketing mistakes can waste money along with ensuring no one sees your local business’s message. Fortunately, these money pits are easily avoidable.

Using Non-Measurable Marketing

Any successful business owner knows it’s not enough to simply run a marketing campaign; it’s also imperative to track it. If you’re engaged in a strategy that you can’t measure, though, you’ll have no way of knowing whether it was a success.
Fortunately, marketing success on most mediums is now measurable. You’d have to make a silly mistake, such as not offering a promo code on radio ads that allow their success to be measured, to really pull off a marketing endeavor that’s truly untraceable.

Not Quickly Following Up Leads

Great marketing methods, whether on or offline, result in gaining leads. Of course, this marketing success can go to waste if you don’t immediately follow up. Studies have shown that leads followed up in an hour are seven times as likely to result in fruitful conversations with purchasers.

Ineffective Use of Promotional Products

Promotional items aren’t for every business, and even companies that could benefit from them often fail to do so. This is usually due to the wrong items being chosen. Sure 23 percent of people would take any free promotional item, but that doesn’t mean they’ll come back. Drawstring bags? They get noticed. Pens? Not so much.

Expecting Too Much, Too Soon

As it turns out, one of the biggest wastes of marketing money is when that money ceases to be spent. All too often, local business owners will expect big results in a short period of time, and when those results don’t come to fruition, a common response is to immediately stop spending money.
What this does is ensure that marketing money that’s already been spent was wasted. Most strategies take time to see results. Social media campaigns, for instance, can take up to six months before showing real results. Maintaining your social media activities is an on-going process and needs to be managed. Even good strategies can take time to be successful.
Marketing is an integral part to any local business’s success, so it’s important to promote a company as much as possible. This becomes much easier when you’re not wasting money, so definitely take the aforementioned tips to heart.