Making a Big Marketing Decision? Before You Follow Your Gut, Do This.

Marketing can help you grow your business and take it to new heights — if you do it right. Unfortunately, most marketers make the same few mistakes again and again. When everyone around you is making the same mistakes with marketing, it can be extremely difficult to fix your approach.

If you’re looking to overhaul your marketing strategy so you can boost returns on marketing investment, it’s time to start actively avoiding the most common marketing mistakes. Here are five mistakes and how to fix them:

1. Relying on gut over data

Making assumptions about what will work and what won’t can be a costly mistake, and is one that’s also fairly common — even experienced marketers make this mistake.

With so many data gathering and analytics tools readily available to businesses these days, there’s really no excuse for marketers to make decisions based on intuition.

The deeper you delve into data, the better your marketing performance will be. You certainly don’t want to make your next move based on your intuition or hearsay and other people’s opinions — you want to see the hard facts about what’s working and what’s not.

This doesn’t mean you should stop experimenting or stop doing what you believe is right, you should just be as informed as possible. The problem is when marketers rely 80% on the gut and 20% on data. When it comes to marketing, it should be the other way around.

2. Following the herd mentality

If everyone is adding emoticons in their subject lines, would you use them too?……[Read More]