Top 5 Marketing Planning Mistakes

Unfortunately, 25 years into my career, I still see medium to small businesses make the same mistakes when it comes to marketing planning. 

These are the five most common mistakes – and some advice on how to avoid them!

Mistake 1. Failing to have a Strategic Marketing Plan

Your Strategic Marketing sets out WHAT you are selling, WHO you are selling it to, and WHY they should buy from you. 

Or, to use marketing terms, your Strategic Marketing clearly shows your Product Offering, Segments and Competitive marketing position.

Without this set-out, your marketing has no boundaries. You could be marketing anything to anyone and not really explaining why they need to choose you.

When I run my 5-week ‘Design a Successful Marketing Pipeline’ course, I really get attendees to focus on answering these strategic marketing questions – and then refining and honing them. Each person then has to fill in a ‘Strategic Marketing Plan’, which I look at before each of my 1-1s with them.

These are the foundations upon which your Marketing is built. If your Strategic Marketing plan is weak or non-existent, your marketing will falter, stumble, and ultimately fail.

Mistake 2. Thinking Tactical Marketing is marketing in its entirety

Tactical Marketing sets out HOW you market your product and service- it’s the marketing communications you DO. It is all about implementing your Marketing Strategy – making sure you are reaching the right people with the right messages about the right products/services. 

It’s the getting on and making it happen stage – the part of marketing that everyone can see (unlike those strategic marketing foundations!).

Most companies that claim to have a marketing strategy are actually talking about Tactical Marketing Plans. Your Tactical Marketing covers things like Pipeline Marketing, Content Marketing, Digital Marketing Plans, PR Plans etc.

While it is REALLY important to have a plan for the marketing you need to DO, you have to set your Strategic Marketing Plan first.

On my 5-week course, we spend the first three weeks sorting out everyone’s Strategic Marketing and the last two weeks on designing a marketing pipeline – tactical marketing.

That gives you an idea about how important – and hard! – it is to get those strategic marketing foundations in place first.

Mistake 3. Using ‘self-reference’ criteria

Too often, I see marketing based on what the Business Owner / Marketing Manager/someone else in the team likes rather than on what your Segments are going to respond to. 

Your key target Segments should be at the heart of your Marketing Plans. You need to be obsessed with thinking:

“Will they like this? Will they enjoy it? Will it give them value?”

Always refer back to the research you have done on your Customer Segments and keep it updated to see what THEY want from your marketing; how do THEY want to be communicated with?

And then obsessively check your data. What got the most response from your segments? The most clicks? Opens? Reads? Response?

Their actions tell you volumes – make sure you listen when it comes to marketing planning.

Find out more on how you can use research to get to know your customer segments better. 

Mistake 4. Focusing on Awareness activities

Let’s face it: most people think marketing is all about Awareness and promotion! It’s more than that. 

There is a whole Marketing Pipeline that your marketing function should be looking after and helping prospects move through until they become loyal customers. Many businesses just plan for ‘Top of Funnel’ (ToFu) marketing – and neglect all those other crucial stages.

When I take people through how to design a successful marketing pipeline, I make them start their planning at the middle of the funnel. This means that by the time we get to the ‘Aware’ part, we are very realistic about how much needs to be done here – and it’s often a lot less than they initially thought!

Mistake 5. Hiring the wrong person to do your marketing

Would you want a dentist if you had arthritis? Of course not! You’d want someone who specialised in that area.

However, I constantly see businesses hire a specialist in one area of marketing and are then surprised when that person delivers marketing that is mostly about their speciality area rather than marketing across the whole pipeline. 

The biggest issue is hiring before figuring out what marketing activities need to go into your marketing pipeline – once you know the marketing activities you have to do, then you’ll know what type of person needs to deliver them.

Expert tip: Often, medium to small businesses need a good, general marketer who can do a range of marketing activities and, crucially, bring in and manage marketing specialists when needed.

How can I help?

I specialise in helping ambitious, determined business leaders figure out what marketing they to get the results they want.

If you want me by your side to show you how to set your marketing plans for success, then get in touch. Let’s chat and see what I can do for you.