Lessons From Failed Businesses: What Not To Do

Businesses fail for any number of reasons, but many of them make common mistakes that could be avoided. If you’ve started or are considering starting a business, avoid theses common pitfalls.

1. No Marketing Strategy:  A new business will need to devote at roughly half of it’s resources, be it time, labour, or dollars — to building a customer base.  It is still all too common for new online initiatives to spend all their resources on getting a store up and running without budgeting money towards the most important factor in any business, marketing.  Remember your customers have to find you so what are you doing to ensure they can find your business?

2. Segmentation and Targeting:  The online world is all about targeting well-defined, niche audiences.  However, some niches are easier to target than others.  Know your niche and focus on targeting your market, if you don’t know your target market run some online campaigns through Google to work out what age group, sex, marital status etc your target market fall in and base your products and marketing campaigns around that.

3. Pricing & Packaging:    Most often, pricing and packaging are two sides of the same coin.  Businesses often ask buyers to buy too much, or too comprehensive a package.  Less often, but also quite common, many businesses actually undersell themselves.  Successful businesses identify their sweet spot.

When you’re starting a business you need to make sure you provide a unique product or service that’s needed, and can last for years. If you do that well, and make the most of your money and marketing, chances are you have a good shot at success.