Marketing Missteps That Hurt Your Brand

We're tackling unprofessional marketing mistakes that could be hurting your business credibility. Shelby shares her personal experience with these common errors and provides simple, actionable solutions to fix them immediately.

• Inconsistent branding across platforms weakens recognition—put your logo on everything and maintain consistent fonts and colors
• Poor photo quality and overuse of generic stock photos reduces engagement—take real photos of your work, team, and projects instead
• Missing or non-mobile-friendly websites hurt credibility—even a simple landing page is better than nothing
• Neglecting your free Google Business Profile costs you visibility—claim and verify your profile immediately
• Overselling on social media drives followers away—focus on educational and engaging content with limited direct selling
• The right content mix builds trust before asking for the sale

Need help implementing these changes? Visit our website to request a free audit of your business marketing and get personalized, actionable recommendations to improve your professional image.

Chapters

• 0:53 Welcome to Marketing Happy Hour
• 1:26 Inconsistent Branding Issues
• 2:45 Poor Photo Quality Problems
• 4:09 Website Essentials for Credibility
• 5:26 Google Business Profile Importance
• 6:47 Social Media Selling Mistakes
• 8:51 Action Steps and Final Thoughts

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:27

What's up y'all? It's Shelby here with the Marketing Happy Hour podcast. Today we are talking about marketing mistakes that may make you look a little bit unprofessional. You may not wanna hear about some of these, but I've done them in the past. I've done them for clients before, and so I'm gonna tell you how I easily fix these mistakes that made my marketing a little bit less professional than what I would really have liked to begin with. So let's dive right on into this.

Speaker 1: 1:00

The first thing and I am constantly preaching this is inconsistent branding across your platforms. I want to see your logo on everything that you put on social media. I want to see your logo on everything that you put on social media. I want to see your logo on flyers on your vehicle. I want to see it on your website. And then, outside of that, when we're talking about branding, we want to make sure we use the same fonts, the color scheme, so that way, people will see and start to put together like, oh, this is the same person, this is the same business. So that's how you're going to fix that inconsistent branding is by putting your logo on everything, and an easy way to do this is just making a template through Canva and making it where everyone in the marketing department or maybe you're the marketing department you can go on there and easily like plug and play some pictures with quotes and that kind of thing. So the first one is we want to be consistent with our branding across all platforms. So let's not do that, guys. Okay, I know you can. The next one is this is like one of my icks, I guess, of marketing is this is like one of my icks, I guess, of marketing poor photo quality or only using generic stock photos.

Speaker 1: 2:19

I have a few clients that are in different states and so they I will either have a professional photographer go out and take pictures if that is in their budget, or I will show them how to take pictures of their office and their products and things like that, or if they want us to use stock photos, that is a very last, like last, thing that I'm going to do for them. I want to make sure everything else is crossed off first. Now, if they are local here in Arkansas to me, I or someone on my team will go and take photos at their store or at their if they have like a mechanic shop or if they're like hey, we just did a roof on this house. Can you like drive by get a photo? Yes, so that is a way that you can fix the unprofessionalism of poor quality photos. That's just easily take out your phone, snap a couple pictures, like if you are out doing, if you're a roofer, like I just said, it's easy to snap some photos of behind the scenes of people working, or if you're in an office, you can do like office lunch together or something like that. But we don't want to only use stock photos, because the algorithm really hates that and also social media is to be social right, and so we want to make sure that we are also being social when it comes to like sharing who we are and behind the scenes and things like that. Okay, this one's a big one.

Speaker 1: 3:43

If you own a business, you need a freaking website. Don't have a broken website. Don't have a website that is not mobile friendly. You need to have a website. So that's what makes you look unprofessional. If you don't have a website, I want you to have a website. Even if it is a simple landing page, you will be is golden, because we are having a presence on Google. Someone has somewhere to go to contact you, learn more about you. And then, most importantly, we now have a place to do a call to action for all of the social media posts. So we want to post on social media and then point people directly to your website and they can find out more information there. So an easy way to fix that is like go to Wix, do a landing page. It's super cheap If you wanna actually budget in a marketing agency to do it. You're looking at like 2,500 to 5,000, depending on what you are wanting out of your website or how extensive you want this website. Just make sure it's mobile friendly, because if it's not, then it's really pointless because we're literally all on our phones all the time. The next one is y'all this is free. So you should definitely have already done this for your business.

Speaker 1: 5:00

Missing Google Business Profile. Google Business Profile is 100% free for you to set up and if you've been in business a long time like I just had a client that I took over all of their marketing stuff online, all the digital stuff, and I saw that they had a Google business profile but they did not own the profile. So I'll go on there and I'm like, oh, manage this business. So I automatically took ownership of the profile itself, because nobody managed it at the time and they've been in business for so long that, before Google even had Google Business Profile, it just automatically updated and made one for them. So now I verified it, I've added photos, I've added the website, the correct phone number. So now that's what you need to do. I mean literally, after you listen to this podcast, I want you to go to Google and I want you to create a Google business profile. You can literally Google Google business profile and it will show you exactly how to do it, step by step, because it's going to increase the views to your website. It'll increase the views to your social media and Google will start to put you in the AI summary stuff whenever people are looking up your products.

Speaker 1: 6:10

The next one that makes you look a little unprofessional. This is a little bit of an ick as well Selling too hard or selling too much on social media. Guys, social media is all about being social. We want people to be engaged. We do not want to do sell, sell, sell, sell. No, we want to be educational. We want to be fun, we want to be engaging, we want to be involved in the community. We don't always want to be selling on social media because if that's what we're doing, people are going to unfollow us. They're going to to get bored with us. They're not going to really care about anything because they're like well, all these people want is like to sell me their product. They don't even care about, like what I'm doing. And so if you're on social media, you can go on there and be social with other people, but then make it more about the people of your business, or more about the owner, or more about the products, as in like how it solves a problem. Not hey, I want you to buy this or hey, I want you to share this, so that way your friends can buy it. Like no, we want to be more educational.

Speaker 1: 7:22

When I do my workshop, then it's all my content. Workshop is all about the four types of content that we do, and selling content is always the last one. And I say do a minimum of like two posts a month. I'm sorry, a maximum of two posts a month about selling your product online, because we want people to read everything else, we want them to get to know us, we want to build that trust. We want them to be comfortable with the people that they're buying stuff from, and then you can hit them with a sell and you can be a sell like. You can sell things without even saying like hey, buy my product. You can sell things through a review post. You can sell things through hey, check out this sign that I just did this week. And then people see it and you've literally sold yourself and didn't even know it. So a few of these we're going to go back through them and just briefly here, because I like to keep these short and sweet, so that way you have actionable items to go back and check off for your business and start to do your marketing the right way. So things that we are going to work on after today.

Speaker 1: 8:29

We want to be consistently branding ourselves across all platforms. So we want to make sure that we have our logo on everything. We have our Canva templates, the same color choice, the same font, so it's a huge pet peeve. We want to make sure that we're using really good photos. Don't do any crappy generic stock photos on your social media stuff, because people are going to see that and they're not going to be like they're just going to keep scrolling. It's not going to make them stop scrolling. That's our point.

Speaker 1: 8:58

Then we have no website. Guys. We want to make sure that we have a website that works and is mobile friendly. It can be so simple. You don't have to be very complex with your first website if you don't want to. You can have a simple landing page that gives people somewhere to go to find out more information about you and to contact you. Then we have our free Google listing profile. So you need to go and do that right now. Upload your new Google business profile, make sure you verify it, add everything to it. Then you can upload photos monthly on it or you can upload your website on there. People can leave you a review and Google just really looks at you in a different light when you actually have a Google business profile.

Speaker 1: 9:41

And the last one we talked about was selling too hard and too much on social media. Just get back to the basis of that content. What do you want to see on social media? What do you like, like what draws you into business pages and brands whenever they're posting? Take some of that and put it into your own business and into your own content. And if you're listening to this and you're like, hey, I really need some help. I don't think I'm doing it right. I may be doing it right. Then just message me. You can go on my website, you can send me a contact form and I will do a free audit of your business and your website and you can gather all that information and then I can give you some actionable steps to take to make your stuff look a little bit better. All right, guys, I will holler at you on the next one.