Are you winding up the budgeting process for next year? Fall is typically a time when businesses are putting together numbers to forecast their expenditures for the next year. You are likely setting goals and making plans to reach those goals. Marketing plays a key role in all of this. Particularly as it pertains to marketing expenses, there is a tendency to see only the dollar signs without seeing the benefits of marketing. It can feel frugal and responsible to cut the marketing budget. As you are making marketing plans for the new year, keep in mind that regardless of the costs involved, there are certain activities in marketing that must take place to keep your business alive. Ignoring, or failing to budget for certain marketing actions will kill your business efforts. What are the marketing mistakes that will kill your business?

Failure to engage your customers

Those who take their customers for granted are asking to lose them. There are three aspects of customer engagement that should be part of your marketing plans. First, reach out and touch them regularly. You cannot afford to have them think they have been forgotten. Secondly, listen to them. If you ignore the opinions of your customers, you are missing a key marketing opportunity. They will tell you what they want from you if you listen to them. It takes the guesswork out of marketing when they tell you what they want and you give it to them. Thirdly, put something new in front of them. The same old thing can become boring quickly. Plan to offer them something new – or at least repackage what you have and make it look new.

Ignore the new marketing media

There are some wonderful tools that are readily available and very cost effective through online marketing. That would include soft pedal engagement through social media, photos, videos and content marketing, more direct marketing efforts with e-blasting, search engine and website advertising, and analytics software that helps you target and track activity. If you are not investing in any of these mediums, you are letting the world pass you by. It is not that traditional mediums – print ads, direct mail, radio, or TV advertising are ineffective, but their costs are much higher per customer engagement than the new media. And in the world we live in, where everything is easy to search for and readily available online, the big media audiences have dwindled.

Never evaluate your efforts

Marketing is a "show me” business. One of the biggest marketing mistakes you can make is to implement marketing without measuring its success. After any marketing efforts, you should track the impact it had on your customers. This goes back to the new media, which has made it very easy to place a cookie on a browser and track activity. Beyond this kind of engagement tracking, you should also be looking at your bottom line. Who is buying from you and how did they come to be your customer? The easiest thing to do is to ask them why they decided to make a purchase. How did they hear about you? What convinced them to give you a try? Take all this into consideration when you are making marketing plans for the future.

Cut off all marketing

Marketing is a key component of any business plan. Business management guru Peter Drucker said, "Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two--and only two--basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.” If Drucker was right, marketing is so essential to any business that it simply will fold if marketing is taken away. Yet I run into so-called "self-made” businessmen who have declared to me that they don’t need marketing. Their innovation and sales tactics is all they need to succeed. Most of the time those kinds of comments just expose ignorance (or arrogance) about what marketing does functionally to drive new customers to your doorstep and to keep old customers coming back for more.

Act like nothing has changed in the world

When you keep doing the same thing in marketing because it is what you have always done, you are setting yourself up to be surpassed by your competition. Marketing is a nimble business discipline. It takes regular evaluation and changes to make it effective. Part of that is your customers’ opinions will shift, but it also is a component of contending well with your competition. What was impressive yesterday will become commonplace tomorrow. Change is part of marketing.

As you make your marketing plans and set your budget for the upcoming year, make sure you are not shortchanging your marketing efforts and killing your business.