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Five marketing activities you should quit doing immediately

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Are you sitting at your computer wondering where your marketing dollars went? You’re not alone.

Many business owners start marketing plans with grand ambitions, then quickly lose track of what’s been spent where, with what return (if any).

Here’s a list of marketing faithfuls you should skip for the remainder of 2012:

1. Advertising in the Yellow Pages for the sake of advertising in the Yellow Pages

Instead of letting their fingers do the walking, people have increasingly turned to the web for fast, informative search.

And why not? After all, today’s rich online marketing incorporates testimonials, photos, recommendations, and so on.

It may well be time to reassess your Yellow Pages spend. Determine whether it’s giving you valuable return on investment.

2. Paying to host a website that was last updated in 1990

If you last spruced up your website when dinosaurs roamed the earth, then you’re due some tough love: either fix it or take it down.

If your website’s outdated and looks rubbish via mobile you could be turning potential customers away in droves.

Fix it. Stat.

3. Reprinting stationery (and other old-school branding tools) without considering if they’re *actually* necessary

Do you really need all that stationary when so much of your marketing is (or can be) done online?

If the honest answer is a big, fat ‘No’, it’s time to redirect those funds.

4. Being annoying. Miz-spellings and the like

If you don’t have time to properly check your outgoing promotional materials, should you be sending them at all? Poorly edited newsletters, for example, could be doing more harm than good.

Not only are errors distracting, they can give the impression that your business is careless.

5. Trying to do everything in-house

Countless businesses waste time and money trying to do things in house that an expert could do better and faster.

If social media, online marketing tactics, or even setting up a website isn’t your core business, achieve a higher long-term ROI by engaging a professional.

Smart SMEs know that redirecting time and money to strategies that deliver the goods makes all the difference. Don’t delay: fine tune your marketing activities today.

Jo Macdermott is the chief Marketing Consultant from Next Marketing in Melbourne. Next Marketing is a full serviced Marketing Agency working with small and medium sized businesses.