To be successful in business you have to successfully market your business no matter what the budget looks like. Marketing is a make-it-or-break-it thing. If you don’t get it right, it can cause you to have to pack and close down the shop. One thing I hate to see is a person with a brilliant business idea that didn’t get off the ground because the marketing failed. One area that I see too often is weak marketing. And like the saying goes, “only the strong survive”.

Here are 5 mistakes that stop you from being a strong marketer.

1. No real target audience

You should have such a laser focus on your target audience that you should be able to recognize them in public. Know your target audience so well that you can recognize how they speak, act, look, and what they spend their money on. When you have truly defined your target audience you know who to focus your efforts and marketing dollars on.

2. You’re “winging it”

There’s no real strategy behind what you’re doing. You haven’t put much thought into where your target audience spends their time, what social media platforms do they use, and how you can get in front of them. You haven’t spent time thinking about your marketing materials and how they will become magnetic. You try something for a week based on something you just read in an article and then abandon the process without really assessing the results of your efforts.

3. No unique positioning statement

Your positioning statement is the value you add and the transformation you provide to your clients or customers. It’s the statement that sets you apart from your competition and is the foundation of all your marketing materials.

4. You don’t capture leads

In short, your business will not grow successfully without an email marketing list. Essentially you lose business without using email marketing. Most business marketing dollars will generate business from repeat customers versus new customers. It cost more to snag a new client or customer as opposed to getting your existing customer excited about doing repeat business with you. You have to nurture the relationship with your leads and existing customers.

5. Copycatting

This kind of goes back to your unique positioning statement. You can identify some foundations in marketing from successful businesses, but don’t try to do it as they do it. Furthermore, we only see the dog and pony show, but we don’t know the behind-the-scenes operations and why they chose that marketing strategy. So be different and bring your real unique value to the table when you launch a marketing campaign.

The truth is you have to be a really strong marketer to actually make a living as a business owner. If you fail to get results you fail to generate enough cash to keep operations going. Focus on getting results and measuring them. Identify one specific business goal, whether it’s newsletter opt-ins, the sale of a product, or RSVPs for an event, and focus all your marketing efforts around the result of that one goal. Get laser-focused on who you’re targeting, what’s the strategy to become visible to them, define how you are unique from the competition, have a way to capture leads (get a landing page designed if you don’t have a website yet), and don’t copy others. Market the uniqueness of what you bring to the table.