Are you alienating your business with poor marketing?

A lot of small business owners are actually hurting their business because they have poor marketing skills. Some people think marketing is nothing more than posting a few ads in a newspaper and sending out some flyers and direct mail pierces. Your writing skills may be hindering your ability to successfully market to your customers and your personality may have a little bit to do with your marketing abilities as well. Here are a few mistakes you could be making and what you need to do to avoid making those mistakes:

• Avoid the "me" factor. When you are marketing, you are promoting your business, but you don't want to make the entire marketing campaign sound like it's just about you. Look for ways to show the audience how you are there to help them instead of how you are there to take their money.
• Regurgitation. If you take your old marketing campaigns and they sound exactly the same every single month, people will start to ignore them. Sure you would like to have some consistency but never changing it makes it look like you do not have any original ideas.
• Copying. While you need to stay ahead of the competition, you never want to be caught copying their work. This is one of the worst marketing campaigns you can do as it does nothing to add credibility to your company and it just simply shows people that you cannot come up with your own ideas.
• Too competitive. If you have seen the ads of the companies that constantly say how their competition doesn't have this or doesn't have that, you know how obnoxious those ads can become. Don't get so caught up in the competition that you neglect to tell people what you do have. You don't have to constantly knock other companies down to show your customers why they need to believe in your company and why they should start buying. Backing up your words with facts is a better approach to competitive marketing.
• You are too pushy. If you find that you are using hard sales language and you are pushing yourself on your customers, they aren't going to stick around for long. People want to make the decision to be sold, they don't want you do to it for them. Avoid sounding like an infomercial and focus on building relationships with your customers instead.
• Too much text. This is a common pitfall for a lot of companies. You have so much information to tell that you end up putting it all in your ad and it is so busy and overrun with text that people don't even pay attention to it. Cut to the chase and quit rambling or you are going to turn off a lot of customers. The power of white space is important so try not to fill it up with tons of extra stuff.
• Lying? Are you caught lying to your customers? This is one of the worst marketing tactics to follow. Sure it will give you a few calls, but once your customers hear the truth, all credibility you have gained will go out the window. People can see right through outrageous claims and they will dump your company quickly if you follow this terrible marketing technique.
• The blah factor. Have you ever picked up and ad and just thought "blah?" Being boring can destroy your marketing campaign and you won't be able to attract new clients this way. You want to engage your audience with action words and different advertisements instead of using the same old campaign over and over.