3 Marketing Sins You Must Never Commit

3 Marketing Sins You Must Never Commit

Marketing is the path to a successful business, but only if done right. Putting your message out in front of people can create customers, but it can also prove to be a waste of time and resources when not done correctly. Unfocused marketing is like flushing time and money down the toilet and no one wants to do that. While the perfect campaign is a complicated balancing act, some sins are so grievous as to ruin your efforts before you even start. Here are three you must always avoid.

Forgetting your target demographic

If you think about your potential customers, there are things they have in common. It might be a love of the type of product you\’re selling, or it might be a cultural trend that comes along for the ride. Whatever it is, it helps you create your demographic: an average of your population, which you can treat as a single person to market toward.

You must always keep your audience in mind. Your marketing must be designed to impact them or show your business in a light they will consider favorable. You might be surprised just how much marketing is wasted by appealing to the wrong people, or speaking to the right people in the wrong way.

Marketing in the wrong place

Now that you\’ve gone through all the trouble of figuring out your target demographic, it\’s important you reach it. There is no use in carefully tailoring content for your audience if they never see it. You must market where your audience is, really truly is, not where you think they “might be”.

When choosing a platform for marketing, make sure it will reach your potential customers. Targeted advertising and social media platforms can be a good way to achieve this, though there are other ways, such as advertising in places your demographic tend to visit. Simply getting your message out is not enough; it must reach the right audience, and it must reach them at a time/place they are able to take it in.

Forgetting perspective

When designing or approving a marketing push, it is the end-viewers perspective that counts. Remember, your business or product is not likely to be a key part of their lives. They have lives, busy ones, full of other things competing for their attention. They are real people, and when they see your content, it is likely to be a low priority for them to engage with it. You need to make it worth their while and give them lots of value because frankly there are lots and lots of choices these days.

Above all, remember that they do not care about your business, other than how it provides a service to them that may enhance their lives. That is the one piece of leverage you have, and it is vital to successful customer creation to remember it, highlight it and amplify it in all your messaging.


Often, there is such a thing as bad publicity – bad reviews when people say, “missed the mark”, “don’t buy – be aware”, “awful” – those reviews generally appear when the product or service is truly disconnected from the audience they are trying to serve. While any marketing campaign runs the risk of failure, ensure yours is off to a good start by making sure you know who your client is, what they need, and where you may be able to reach them. Showing that you truly know and understand your customer is always the first step in serving them.

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