Business spends huge money on sending their message to customers, but the results leave much to be desired:

For every $92 spent acquiring customers, only $1 is spent converting them; besides, only 8% of users pay attention to marketing ads and click on them.

Yet, one assured method exists to generate lots of buzz about your business and advertising.

People notice marketing mistakes right along, discussing and criticizing brands for them. This is the case when advertising defeats its own object, despite allowing you to learn from mistakes, draw out a lesson, and get feet under your table.

Failures become those signposts indicating the way to effective marketing. However, some mistakes come at a price.

Here go top seven, able to create a negative attitude toward your business as well as nip your ad conversion in the bud.

1. You don’t consider human factors

The biggest mistake of small business owners would be to follow the lead of big dogs adverting to barren business language in their marketing campaigns. They forget about users on the other side of the screen, willing to communicate to people rather than brands and products names.

So build relations with humans and don’t throw information blocks into a faceless audience. Nielsen’s Global Trust in Advertising report confirms the effectiveness of such an approach.

Asking users about factors influencing their trust in ads, Nielsen’s experts marked those resonating most: humorous, value- and family-oriented, real-file situations are what works best.

Marketing tip: When writing texts for your ads, remember about the human factor behind your audience. Talk their language, don’t plagiarize writing style, voice, and tone of your competitors, and speak about what appeals to your consumers.

2. You take social issues in vain

Appealing to social issues or newsjacking is a constant brinkmanship. When done right, it brings your business the benefits such as:

• Traffic growth
• Your brand’s integration into daily news background
• Link product to a high-involvement issue
• Engagement rate growth
• Information market leadership

But a huge mistake would be to use social issues for small business ads. It hurts reputation and may destroy your customer funnel (engagement and nurturing, in particular).

As a simple refresher, let’s take a look at this tweet from AT&T who published it on the 9/11 day:

Followers perceived it as the attempt to play on the tragedy for marketing goals. Such negative reaction made AT&T marketers delete the tweet within an hour of publication.

Marketing tip: When publishing your sales copies and ads, try to pre-estimate reactions. Appeal to psychology and enhance emotional intelligence for a better understanding of your target audience.

3. You target fans

Spending money on pay per click as well as any other ad type targeting your existing audience… well… sucks: they know you and your offer already, so don’t reach them with advertising.

When having clients-friendly perks, just create a status update for fans to see, like, and get it shared so you could sell to them. What you need for ads is a broader targeting, but don’t overdo it.

What is it with that?

For example, you decide to target new customers with Facebook ads, and your audience is newbie photographers. You launch the campaign based on interests like photography, and that’s where a mistake hides.

Why?

We all love photography: your mum, friends, and ex like it but none of them has the interest in learning about it.

Marketing tip: Be more specific about targeting the new audience. In the case with photography, you might want to attract and engage those interested in entry-level camera models as it’s something amateur photographers most likely use.

4. You forget about copywriting tricks

Rare small business owners bother about writing texts for ads. However, copywriting gizmos such as clear value propositions, words, and images influence your conversion rate per se.

The most common mistakes marketers still make:

• Weak headlines. A first-rate headline doesn’t simply state what you offer but explains the benefit behind your product. It’s short, clear and easy to understand, and avoids cliches as well as business jargon.
• Wrong ad image. Visual elements you choose for ads should hook users and make them want to click. For that, consider size/color/contrast combo.
• Sluggish words. One word or phrase can change your conversion rate by 100%, so use power verbs that appeal to human emotions. Avoid vagueness and gobbledegook in your ads.
• No CTA. Just because people see your ad doesn’t mean they want to click and learn more about your business. Most need a little push in the right direction, so make sure to add CTA to every ad you create. Give users a reason to choose you.

Marketing tip: Learn how to write ad texts and sales copy. Words are a powerful weapon allowing to influence decision-making, so make sure you don’t kill conversion by choosing wrong lexical items for your ads.

5. You wrongly use SMM tools

Time after time, social media come up with new tools to help marketers, but the latter often use them wrong.

Thus, McDonald’s once used a #McDStories hashtag to encourage sharing nostalgic stories related to the brand; but they didn’t explain it to people. As the result, followers used the hashtag to complain about poor service and low-quality food.

AmericanAir failed when used the automatic reply feature in Twitter; it showed the brand’s unwillingness to get feedback from their audience.

Marketing tip: Use new tools for advertising only after learning them inside out. Pay attention to instructing your audience about what you want from them.

6. You focus on a product

Your advertising is not about you but customers, so a huge mistake would be talking about how cool you are and what luxury features your product/service has.

No one will care.

Instead, link those features to a value. Focus on your customers’ needs, and use ads to talk about how your product solves their problems. Such an approach will help to build a steady stream of leads.

7. You don’t track

Picture this:

76% of marketers track effectiveness wrongly, considering awareness/engagement enough for success and mistaking it for conversion.

The question appears:

How do they know what advertising is most effective for their business and what they could change to make it better as well as influence their conversion rates?

The answer is… no how.

Two things work in digital marketing: testing and tracking. Once you know what works for your business, you invest into it and win more customers instead of blindly placing ads everywhere.

Marketing tip: Track your ads like crazy. Focus on metrics such as ad frequency, CTR, number of leads, relevance score, clicks by interest, and performance by placement.

Do any of the above mistakes sound familiar?

Fix your marketing strategy, if so. Put your ad campaigns into order. If you don’t know how to do that, ask experts to help you with copywriting, design, and choosing right channels for media placement. Use advertising wisely, not blindly – and you’ll be converting more than spending on it.

About the Author

Lesley J. Vos is a contributing writer to publications on content, social media, and digital marketing in general. She writes an e-book on guest blogging, creates texts on writing craft and education, and teaches the French language to high school students.