Here are three “Marketing Mistakes” that business owners routinely make.  (I saw an article in Direct Magazine which inspired me.)

1. Marketing plans and not aligned with business goals.   For instance, say you have a goals to grow top-line revenues by 50%. (Only 50%?  Well, it is a recession.)  In Formula 5 terms, that would mean a three-part combination of strategies to improve pricing and margins, monetization of each customer, and of course, lead generation.   Most business owners never think this way. They never try to figure out what it will take to reach that 50%, in action-oriented terms.

Work backwards from the goal. Ask the question, what will it take?  Which parts of the business would be most amenable to improvement?  Once you figure that out you can take the next step.

What can you add to your value proposition to justify a price increase – and how much could you add?  What can you sell to your existing (and very happy) customers?  Do you have that product or service? If not, what’s the plan to create it?  What about new leads?  Can you amp up your existing programs, or do you need to create new channels?

Create goals for each of these three improvement programs, with detailed action steps.  Get busy meeting the business goals.

2) Not measuring the right things to reach those goals.  Most business owners don’t keep good track of their marketing activities so they have no idea what’s what.  Online marketers tend to be better, but not that much.  As the old saying goes, if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.  If you don’t keep careful track of things, you are unable to take the right actions, and you never know if you’re on or off course.  And if all you’re looking at is number of new leads and conversion rate – well, that’s not bad, but it is just not enough.

Understand your  Customer lifetime profits,  average customer life, purchase frequency, and average transaction size.  Add to that your conversion rates and cost of customer acquisition by marketing channel, and you know everything necessary to drive the business results.  Without every one… it’s sort of like driving your car without a gas gauge.  Would you do that?

3) Not knowing the cost of your goals, and not spending to reach them.  This is the one almost every small business owner makes, and many large ones as well.  Want to grow your business by 50%?  Have you bothered to figure out that you need to advance $100,000 on lead generation and spend another $100k on product development and $50k on customer service to reach that goal?  Do you have the cash or credit to do this?  Most people never bother to figure this out which results in many business growth plans stopping short. And failure to execute always leads to failure.

Address each of these mistakes and you have a much higher chance of reaching your growth goals.