Over 90% of business owners commit these marketing sins—and it’s costing them dearly in lost sales and revenues. Chances are, you’re one of them.

Before we dive into how to fix these mistakes and turbocharge your marketing, let’s expose the crimes first:

Marketing Mistake #1: Using the 3 Forbidden Phrases
Your marketing is likely littered with platitudes – dull, overused phrases that fail to differentiate you from competitors. “Best service,” “highest quality,” “state-of-the-art” – we’ve heard it all before. These clichés make you blend into the sea of sameness instead of standing out.

To see if you’re guilty, grab one of your brochures, ads, or marketing materials. Do the phrases pass the “Who else can say that?” test? If your competitor can plaster the same words on their marketing, you’ve violated this critical rule.

Marketing Mistake #2: Fragmented or Piecemeal Marketing
This second deadly sin is likely the more painful one. Instead of having a cohesive marketing system that guides prospects through a unified journey to your door, your marketing efforts are fragmented.

Think about it – who creates your marketing materials? The radio station produces your radio ads. The magazine designs your print ads. An agency handles your website. Everything is piecemealed out to different vendors pushing different agendas.

Without an overarching system and unified messaging strategy, your marketing becomes a mixed bag of inconsistent, uncoordinated tactics. It fails to tell a compelling, linear story that facilitates the buyer’s decision-making process and naturally leads them to choose you over competitors.

Successful companies like Apple demonstrate the power of systematized marketing. Their entire sales cycle is an interlocked system that Apple owns from end-to-end, rather than being dictated by outside parties.

The fragmented, piecemeal approach is completely backwards. Your message should dictate your mediums and channels, not the other way around. Yet for most businesses, the messaging is an afterthought, thrown together quickly by those actually creating the ads and materials.

I’ll reveal a simple way to identify if your marketing messages could be swapped with a competitor’s name and still make sense. If so, it’s a sign you’re suffering from this fragmentation problem in a big way.

If either of these marketing mistakes rings true, don’t worry – solutions are coming. But you have to recognize the issues first. Prepare to have your eyes opened to some hard truths about why your marketing isn’t living up to its potential.