Growing your business isn’t as easy as it sounds.
If you’re trying to scale your business quickly, it takes a well-crafted marketing strategy backed by data and proper action to pull off.
If you don’t have much experience running successful campaigns, it can be easy to miss or overlook essential parts of your strategy.
The good news is, as a growth marketing agency of 16 years, our team know a thing or two about this topic.
So I picked their brains, and we narrowed down the 5 biggest mistakes some businesses make when trying to grow their business quickly – check them out below!
Focusing solely on outbound marketing
Being proactive is essential if you want to grow your business.
Many people think being proactive in marketing means focusing on outbound channels, as you’re taking a more direct approach by reaching out to people.
But, to be fully proactive with your marketing, you need to position your business in places where your customers can find you on their own.
Investing your time and budget into really nailing your inbound marketing, like SEO or PPC, will help you scale your business far more quickly than just solely focusing on outbound campaigns.
It’s not just crucial for diversifying your reach; it’ll also help increase your conversions, with SEO leads giving an average conversion rate of 14.6%, rather than the 1.7% that outbound leads like print media offer.
Don’t get me wrong, you should still invest in outbound marketing, but the important thing is finding the right balance between outbound and inbound marketing campaigns.
Being afraid to take risks
Marketing is full of risks, and you’ll find it extremely hard to grow your business if you always avoid taking them.
By taking risks, I don’t mean just randomly taking actions without thinking them through.
I mean not being afraid to try different platforms and tactics and taking calculated risks backed by a solid plan.
Unless your marketing is bang on and you’re raking in the leads, you’ve got to be brave with your marketing by testing and trialling different strategies!
Not focusing on optimisation
To effectively scale your marketing results and business growth, you need to regularly monitor your progress, analyse results, and optimise your strategy.
So many businesses struggle to scale their marketing results because they don’t monitor and implement changes to their strategy; if things aren’t working, they just call it quits, and then they’re back to square one.
Others will go ahead and make optimisations on a whim, without the data to back it up and find that their marketing performs worse than it did before!
Always look for changes to improve your marketing efficiency, and use data to inform your decisions.
Investing too much too quickly
Some businesses make the big mistake of investing too quickly into campaigns before setting a clear strategy or finding an approach that works.
Let’s use PPC campaigns as an example.
If you’re launching a PPC campaign for the first time, the best course of action is to start with a smaller budget to test the waters and then increase it once you’ve found a strategy and structure that’s gaining traction.
But some businesses try to run before they can walk by starting with a higher budget before creating a solid account structure or keyword strategy.
The result? Quickly running out of your budget with no return on investment to show for it.
Start slowly when trying out a new strategy, and then scale your budget when you’ve found an approach that works.
Forgetting to be human
No matter what business you’re in, what marketing channels you use, or the goal you’re trying to achieve, there’s one salient thing that you need to keep in mind.
People!
People are at the core of your business and need to be at the heart of your marketing strategy too!
There’s a reason that we’ve built our entire brand around doing things ‘The human way’; because we know that the key to creating sustainable business growth is by taking a people-first approach.
Too many businesses create content that lacks personality or run ads that don’t evoke an emotional reaction (or the wrong one).
The result is disengaged customers and minimal traction from your marketing strategies.
Rather than seeing your audience as a whole or as ‘businesses’ or ‘consumers’, treat them as what they are… people!
When you focus on humanising your marketing, you’ll see more engagement, better leads, and stronger customer relationships.
Need a hand with your marketing?
Want to grow your business sustainably but not sure where to start?
Book a Free 1-2-1 Growth Workshop with us, and get some fresh marketing ideas from our Growth & Digital Specialists!
In your 90-minute workshop, you’ll chat with our founder Adam and the team about your challenges with your business growth and marketing and how you can overcome them.
The session will be entirely bespoke to your challenges and goals, and you’ll come away with a better understanding of how to grow your business online and some new marketing ideas to try!
You will also get the following:
- A free website and user experience review
- A free Google ranking audit report
- Advice on the latest and greatest digital trends and tools
- Advice on how to generate leads for your business
- Marketing strategy guidance – how you can overcome your specific marketing challenge and grow your business
