Marketing mistakes happen and they aren’t necessarily brand-destructive. You can see this from the examples of Dr. Pepper, Urban Outfitters, or EA (the reasons why the EA brand crashed and burned have nothing to do with promo packages containing illegal weaponry). However, while a blunder with an insensitive slogan or bad design is a fixable issue, there are marketing mistakes that can ruin you. Those happen when you aren’t using your tools the right way. In this case, your marketing strategy is ineffective or, what’s even worse, it may turn against you. To avoid these destructive mistakes you have to develop most efficient strategies for every type of marketing.

Top 4 Marketing Mistakes You Are Making Right Now with Fixes

1. Not Using a Lead Magnet, or Using a Wrong One

A lead magnet is the thing that will help bring customers to your website and have them sign up. Note that this doesn’t necessarily have to be your product. The purpose of a lead magnet is to bring leads, not make conversions. Therefore, using a wrong kind of item for this purpose makes the entire thing useless.

For example, a travel agency that uses offers of uber-cheap last-minute deals as a lead magnet is making a marketing mistake. Yes, these ads can bring people looking for cheap deals to your website. However, they won’t generate many leads.

On the other hand, a travel agency that offers free downloads of attraction maps for their main destinations has a great lead magnet. A map of attractions is a useful thing that every traveler or potential traveler needs and wants to have. Getting it for free is the clincher. Make it so that people have to sign up or simply leave their email to get the desired free map. Now the travel agency has a valuable addition to their email marketing database. And emails you send to those emails should contain ads of the hot cheap deals you have. This will be your work for boosting conversions.

2. Running an Ineffective Email Marketing Campaign

Social media might be booming now, but three-quarters of businesses still acknowledge that email marketing offers good-to-excellent ROI (HubSpot). This is one of the most effective marketing tools. Yet, it’s also one of the most misused.

One of the biggest email marketing mistakes is not collecting and processing the data on your campaign’s performance. Studying statistics can help you learn about what kind of things increase the click-through rate for emails. However, do you know how many of your customers made a purchase due to the email you sent? Do you know why they didn’t make that purchase after receiving it? What do you need to improve about these messages?

To fix this marketing mistake you need to rethink your email campaigns entirely. Study data on the subject to learn what kind of messages are most effective. Then, use specialized email marketing tools. They will help you understand the efficiency of your campaign. Modern top-quality tools also include automation features and templates designed based on marketing studies. Basically, they can do most of the work, so you can concentrate on writing a most compelling message.

3. Using Popups Badly

Not using popups at all is one of the more serious marketing mistakes. Nothing focuses one’s attention as much as a message that jumps at you from the screen. Popups are impossible not to notice, so you can be sure your message is delivered. However, many people use this tool wrongly. Which means that all of its power turns against you.

The main issues with popups are setting the wrong message or using too many of them.

The right kind of popup is your lead magnet. Use this opportunity to draw attention to something that is sure to prompt the viewer to click through. Another kind of message to put there is an alert about something truly important. In that case, you won’t help your marketing much, but you might strengthen your brand by improving relationship with your customers.

One popup is enough to deliver the message and get the maximum efficiency this marketing tool can provide. Using more than one will start annoying your website’s visitors. And remember to time your popups to appear a bit after the visitor gets onto your website. Springing a message right away is annoying as well.

4. Not Doing A/B Testing

No matter how busy you are of how sure you are in your product/content, you have to run A/B testing. This is a vital step to ensure you avoided many of the possible marketing mistakes. This is the step that can boost quality of your marketing strategy overall.

You need to run A/B tests regularly to ensure every element of your strategy performs as well as it possibly can.

Final Thoughts: How to Avoid Marketing Mistakes

Do your research, test your options, and use professional marketing tools that can help you. These are three simple steps to avoiding mistakes that can damage your business’ chances of success.