Marketing mistakes to avoid on a limited budget

As a start up business you are probably working with a limited marketing budget, even business that have been around for a while will be faced with a limited marketing budget. Sticking to your marketing budget is something that all businesses need to think about because if you spend your entire marketing budget within a few months you won't have anything to work with until the next year. The worst part about that is if you spend your entire marketing budget and fail your business is likely to fail too.

When it comes to marketing on a limited budget, there is very little room for errors. Here are some marketing mistakes that you will want to avoid when working on a limited marketing budget.

Number one: Going all in

The biggest mistake that you can make is spending your entire marketing budget on creating an advertisement and running it. For example, creating an advertisement and then purchasing a spot for it to run on Super Bowl Sunday. Sure, plenty of people will get to see your advertisement, but that is the only advertisement that your business will be able to do all year. You will not be able to market your business any other way because all of your money was spent on that one ad, which will only be shown that one time.

Number two: No focus

This usually is a problem because when you first start marketing your business it is easy to be caught up in all of the different marketing tactics that you can use. If you have a limited marketing budget what you are going to need to do is to focus on a few marketing tactics that you want to use for your business. You should pick about five tactics to use, and ensure that they will work for your budget before committing to using them. Many times people lose focus and try to use too many marketing tactics, which ends up resulting in failure.

Number three: Testing and research

Testing the market and doing basic market research is needed if you plan to have a successful marketing plan. The reason that you need to do some market research, as well as testing the market is because you need to ensure that your product or service is something that is needed, you want to make sure that people will purchase your product. Instead of doing research many business owners assume that people will want their product and they waste a ton of money getting their business up and going only to find out that there is no demand or the market is already saturated with that same product.

Number four: Not spending enough on marketing

While it is easy to only focus on one or two marketing tactics, you really need to create the perfect marketing mix for your business. What happens when you only focus on one or two marketing tactics is that your business is not reaching as many people as possible, which means you will not be maximizing your sales. Only focusing one or two tactics can also cause you to not spend enough on marketing because you don't set aside enough money to cover other effective marketing tactics. What you need to do is pick four or five marketing tactics that will work for your business and then set aside enough money in your marketing budget to cover those tactics. Spending money on marketing is important for your business because without marketing you won't have a business because customers will not know about the product or service that you are offering, so you will not make any sales.