There are no active polls at this time.

Have you ever sent out a sales letter and received little or no response, or put up a Web site and found hardly anyone visiting it?

Let’s be honest; everyone makes mistakes. The difference between the winners and the losers in business is that winners recognize their mistakes and avoid making the same blunders again. Each time you can recognize a marketing mistake and correct it, your marketing will be that much better.

Marketing experts got that way by working full time at making more marketing mistakes than you can imagine and then learning from them.

Common marketing mistakes include:

• Starting your marketing with a focus on your credentials, products and services instead of on client problems.

• Using a label to describe what you do instead of a value positioning statement of a sentence or less that tells prospects which problems you solve.

• Developing a tagline, article title or Web page title without taking the time to discover which words will attract your clients.

• Wasting time pushing information about yourself to prospects instead of pulling them in with ideas they are interested in.

• Not providing prospects with a free offer to get their contact information.

• Forgetting to regularly follow up with prospects.

• Building a Web site without a clear step-by-step map of how you will attract visitors to the site, and what you want them to do once they get there.

• Not having offers and strategies to turn prospects into clients and clients into repeat clients and sources of referrals.

If you’ve made any of the listed marketing mistakes, you’re not alone. But if you want to grow your business, don’t repeat these blunders again and again. If you’re not getting the results you want, look for a new strategy, modify your tactics and change your materials.

Strategy
Base your marketing on a clear set of principles. Have a clearly defined strategy and marketing plan. Use approaches that work for independent professionals and small business.

Tactics
Plan your marketing so it’s organized and individual efforts are additive and contribute to building your business.

Materials
Make sure individual marketing pieces resonate with your target market, get their attention and move them to the action you want them to take.

Fix your marketing tactics and materials by testing ideas, keeping the ones that work and throwing out the ones that don’t.

In the process of growing your business you’re bound to make marketing mistakes. The more you make, identify and learn from, the faster your marketing will improve and the more clients you will attract.

---

©2003 In Mind Communications, LLC. All rights reserved. Charlie Cook is President of In Mind Communications in Old Greenwich, CT and can be contacted via www.charliecook.net, or by calling 203-637-1118. To get the Free Marketing Guide and the ‘More Business’ newsletter full of practical marketing tips go to www.charliecook.net.