The first year of a business is loud. You’re doing the work, chasing invoices and learning the tax system. Marketing gets whatever hours are left.
That’s how the same mistakes show up again and again. None of them are fatal. All of them are expensive, mostly in time and in customers you never knew you lost.
Here are seven to avoid, with a fix for each.
1. Trying to sell to everyone
“Anyone who needs a plumber” isn’t a customer. It’s a crowd.
When you speak to everyone, your message turns bland. Your ads get vague, your website says nothing specific, and people scroll past. A customer wants to feel you built the business for them.
It’s also hard to price and plan when you don’t know who you’re serving. Your best customers tend to share things: a similar problem, a similar budget, a similar way of finding you. Those patterns are worth more than any ad.
The fix. Write a short description of your best three customers. Their job, their problem, how they found you. Aim your marketing at people like them. You can widen later.
2. Being on every platform
New owners often open accounts on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn and X in the same week. Then they post twice and go quiet.
A half-used profile does more harm than no profile. It tells visitors you’ve stopped trading. It also splits your effort so thinly that none of the channels get enough attention to work.
Pick one or two channels where your customers spend time. Do those properly for six months. If your customers are tradies, that probably isn’t LinkedIn. If they’re business owners, it might be. Ask a few customers where they look for businesses like yours. Their answers beat any guess.
3. Not tracking where customers come from
If someone books a job, do you know how they found you? Most new owners don’t. They guess.
Without that information you can’t tell which marketing works. You end up paying for things that don’t deliver and ignoring things that do. A guess is fine in month one. By month twelve it’s costing you real money.
The fix. Ask every new customer how they heard about you. Write it in a spreadsheet. Add a line to your booking form. After three months, you’ll have real numbers.
Set up Google Analytics on your website too. It’s free, and it shows you what visitors do once they arrive.
4. Treating the website as a brochure
A website isn’t a poster you put up and forget. It’s the one sales channel you control.
Brochure sites share the same traits: a long “about us” story, a list of services in vague terms, and a contact form buried at the bottom. They read well to the owner and say little to a stranger.
Better sites do this:
• answer the questions customers ask on the phone
• show prices, or at least ranges, where they can
• put the next step on every page
• include real photos and real reviews
If you’ve ever said “I get asked that all the time”, that answer belongs on your site. Every question you answer before the phone rings is one less call you need to take, and one less reason for a customer to look elsewhere.
5. Skipping the email list
Social media reach belongs to the platform. An email list belongs to you.
Owners put this off because it feels like a big project. It isn’t. Start with a simple signup box on your site and a note on your invoices and receipts. Offer something small in return, such as a checklist or a seasonal reminder.
Then send something useful once a month. A tip, an update, a reminder that you’re open for bookings. That alone puts you ahead of most competitors. You don’t need a fancy design. A plain email from a real person often does better than a polished newsletter.
6. Discounting too early
A discount feels like a quick way to get customers in the door. It also trains people to wait for the next one.
Low prices attract customers who shop on price, and those customers leave when somebody else is cheaper. You also give up margin you’ll want when costs rise. Winning back a price after cutting it is much harder than holding it in the first place.
The fix. Compete on something else first. Speed, service, a guarantee, a specialist skill. Use discounts sparingly, with a clear end date and a reason, like a quiet season or a first-time offer.
7. Quitting before it has time to work
Most marketing takes months to pay off. A post doesn’t fill your diary overnight. A new page on your site can take weeks to appear in search results.
Owners often judge a channel after four weeks, decide it doesn’t work, and switch. Then they do it again with the next one. They never stay with anything long enough to learn. By the end of the year they’ve tried everything and finished nothing.
The fix. Choose a channel, set a three-month window, and decide in advance what result you’d call a success. Review at the end. Keep what’s working. Drop what isn’t.
That’s also a good moment to ask for help. If you’ve tried the basics and the results are flat, a good SEO agency Melbourne owners can call on will look at what you’ve done and tell you where the gaps are. Ask them to explain it in plain English. If they can’t, find another.
A simple routine that beats a big plan
Most owners don’t need a marketing calendar. They need a weekly habit. Try this:
• Monday: spend ten minutes updating your Google listing or replying to reviews.
• Wednesday: post once on your main channel, using a real photo from a recent job.
• Friday: write down every enquiry from the week and where it came from.
That’s under an hour a week. Run it for a quarter and you’ll know more about your marketing than most businesses ever learn. Then you can decide where to spend money, if at all.
One page to take away
If you only fix one thing this month, write down who your best customer is and where they spend their time. Every other decision gets easier from there.
Marketing doesn’t need to be clever in year one. It needs to be consistent, aimed at the right people and measured. Do those three things and you’ll be ahead of most businesses ten times your size.