You’ve got so many options when it comes to advertising your business, both online and offline. It’s awful when you spend a lot of money or time trying out a new strategy, only to find it wasn’t worth it.

In the following article, Brooke Chaplan offers advice to help you avoid three common marketing mistakes.

Marketing and advertising campaigns that fail can be disastrous for any business. So much time and money is spent trying to hone in on the perfect strategy. Your company should learn from the mistakes of other businesses and incorporate the following three pieces of advice into their marketing and advertising strategies. Doing so will increase customer retention, competitiveness, and overall sales.

Wrong Focus

Many companies mistakenly focus on the wrong marketing or advertising platforms. For example, businesses with a weak online e-commerce infrastructure often are obsessed with staying active on social media platforms. They do this because the media never stops stressing the importance of social media advertising. However, maintaining an active blog or Facebook account isn’t worth it if there are no ways to actually make money off of it. Therefore, marketing and advertising strategies must be in sync with current operational processes and technology limitations. In a nutshell, marketing and advertisement campaigns must be based on current customer channels and platforms.

Wrong Target Demographics

In certain scenarios, marketing or advertising efforts may be focused on the wrong target demographic group. For example, companies that offer excellent one-on-one consulting may branch out to group programs because they are imitating competitors, or trying to expand their marketing reach. However, the business model must match the target demographics. Employees that are used to one-on-one consulting may struggle with dealing with a group of clients who expect individualized attention. Therefore, the target demographic group should be inclusive enough to generate continual revenue from the public, but also exclusive enough to offer specialized services, pricing and benefits. You also want to be sure age doesn’t affect your marketing or advertising. Older generations might not see your online banner ads, and customers that shop at online retailers will maximize savings by looking for Target coupons on sites like discountrue. Think about how and where your ads are placed will affect who sees them.

Blandness

Competition in every industry is fierce, and sometimes even cut-throat competitors may surreptitiously borrow or blatantly steal marketing and ad content or techniques. Your products and services need to truly stand out from the competition. Keep in mind that customers may only look or listen to an ad for a few seconds, so it must be engaging, exciting and fun. If you struggle to specialize the product or service, consider focusing on building a unique brand and company image, like Starbucks or Zappos successfully did. In fact, consider studying the most successful competitors’ marketing campaigns in order to learn from them.

Overall, marketing and advertising efforts must be continually evaluated in order to guarantee consistent sales and business growth. This can be achieved through unifying advertising and operations, focusing on the right demographic groups, and specializing your products or services.