5 Marketing Mistakes You Need to Stop Making in 2025

The biggest misconception about work is that you either do a good job and make a positive difference or do a bad job and make no difference. The problem with this idea is that it completely excludes the third (and the most likely) outcome of doing something that causes damage to your cause.

This is especially the case in marketing, seeing as how everything you do is public. Therefore, marketing mistakes are the most damning because everything you do is a hit-or-miss.

With that in mind and without further ado, here are the top five marketing mistakes you need to stop making in 2025.

While company logos and brands evolve over the years, they always try to maintain consistency. This consistency can range from critical to trivial; however, you need to start with the former.

One of the biggest marketing mistakes to avoid is pivoting too often. Sure, you’re allowed to change direction every now and then, but your business's spirit and character need to remain the same. 

If you pivot too often (with your values, especially), people will not only have a weaker response to your brand as a whole, but they’ll hold it against you. Hugo Boss, for instance, is not very inclusive but never asks them about their most popular men’s line during the 1940s. 

You also need to have the same brand idea. Decide early on whether you are a luxury or budget brand. Sure, you can always take the middle-of-the-road direction; it’s just important to understand where you stand price-wise and be consistent in this regard. Consistency will always get you out of a rough spot, regardless of whether you’re trying to earn more links or promote a new product.

You also want to maintain the same tone and voice. When addressing your audience (through your content), your content needs to sound like the same person is writing it. Sure, it doesn’t have to be the same person, but as long as they follow the general direction, the difference will be too hard to tell.

The simplest trick to maintaining consistency is to keep the same team for as long as possible.

One of the biggest pitfalls is a fall in quality, often when you take on more work than you can handle. So, don’t allow a greater workload to ruin your quality. One of the biggest marketing mistakes is not learning how to say no.

You can’t receive only positive feedback, and if your skin is too thin for some criticism (even unjustified or too cruel), you might not be cut out for digital marketing. In fact, ignoring bad reviews, believing they’re harmful or useless, is one of the biggest digital marketing mistakes ever. Not only that, but you’re missing out on amazing potential.  

First, you need to understand that not all of these bad reviews are online trolling, nor are they malicious. Some contain actual constructive criticism, which is valuable feedback. This is the most important thing when someone tells you that your marketing is not working and gives you an explanation why. Ignoring this or deleting it so that others don’t see it is a critical mistake.

Some of these ideas can even be ground-breaking and provide you with more insight than even the best keyword research process.

It also helps to have some negative reviews mixed up with some positive ones. This keeps feedback feeling genuine. If there are only positive reviews in the feed, it will appear as if you’re deleting every bad comment.

You also want to maintain the positive-to-negative ratio in your favor. Sure, you want negative comments, but you need to have at least a 5-7 to one ratio in your favor. This way, you get a huge optical win while keeping the review list seemingly genuine.

Finally, responding to them positively is a great PR win for your enterprise. It shows that you’re a bigger person. Arguing with random strangers online is one of the biggest marketing mistakes to avoid.

Earlier on, we talked about defining your brand. Regardless of your vision, you can’t define your brand in a vacuum. First, you need to understand who your audience is and what they find appealing in your product. This is how you set your USP and your entire strategy. Ignoring customer profiling or postponing it for later is one of the biggest marketing mistakes you could ever make. 

The first major mistake that this will lead to is focusing on the wrong platforms. Imagine if your audience was predominantly male; however, you have no idea, so you decide to allocate the majority of your budget toward advertising on Pinterest. 

Not the best idea, is it? 

What about having a lot of boomers in your audience and choosing to spend most of your marketing budget on TikTok promotions? 

Knowing your audience will help you understand which formats and content types to focus on.

Understanding your audience will also help you choose the language you can use in your content. Using jargon and technical terms your audience doesn’t understand is one of the easiest ways to lose them and drive them away from your content.

Most importantly, you need to understand their purchasing power.  If your products are too expensive for the audience that you’re reaching out to, nothing you do will really matter. 

Averages are great, but when you decide just to take an average as a customer profile, you’ll be terribly off-mark. You can’t take an audience of 20-year-olds and 80-year-olds and pretend like the average customer persona that has 50 years covers them both. 

You need to have the right data 

How do marketers use data to identify realistic goals? 

By asking the right questions.

Underestimating what digital marketers do and assuming that DIY projects are just as good as those professionally made are some of the most common digital marketing mistakes. What do you think? Why do some of the world’s most successful companies still choose to outsource their digital marketing instead of just starting an in-house department?

First, you need to understand the benefits of outsourcing. It’s not that you can’t do these tasks. It’s that you can’t do them in time and cost-effectively. It’s better to look for someone who already has a team that’s well-versed in these tasks and delegate some of these tasks to them. 

The biggest problem is that people often don’t understand this and assume that they can just do it on their own. Why? Because, on the surface, it seems simple and familiar.

Just take a look at these few examples.

First, you have the concept of social media management that a lot of people believe they can do on their own. Why? Well, it’s the classical case of the Dunning-Kruger effect. They know that they run their own social media profiles, and it doesn’t seem like such a big leap from there to running a business profile. The difference, however, is astronomical.

Another difference comes in the form of a comparison of professional SEO vs DIY SEO. The effects are never the same but since SEO results take a while, a lot of people assume that the difference is not that big.

Lastly, you have to think about scalability and consistency. Everything is easier when you go through a professional agency, and even major industry shifts won’t cause such major changes.

While attracting new audiences is what the majority of marketers are hired to do, in reality, there’s one task that’s more important. One of the biggest mistakes a marketer can make when engaging in digital marketing is to ignore customer retention.

Return customers are much more profitable. According to some estimates, about 20% of return customers make about 80% of all your profit. 

This is not just because they have more purchases than everyone else. With return purchases, the customer's lifetime value increases, as well. You see, every next purchase is more valuable. A person returning for the second time is more open to cross-selling and upselling. They might even choose to increase the value of the offer on their own. 

It’s also worth mentioning that it’s five times cheaper to make an old customer return than it is to attract a new customer. This means that you’ll get a better cost per conversion. 

Ultimately, every returning customer starts as a first-time customer. This is why it’s also important that you focus on the customer lifecycle. They start as a lead and eventually become a customer but their journey doesn’t end here. If you nurture them long enough, some of them will eventually become brand ambassadors. 

So, new or old customers? BOTH!

Lastly, you shouldn’t make too many assumptions. 

You shouldn’t assume that your audience doesn’t remember your old mission and vision. You shouldn’t assume that you can just delete and ignore negative comments without repercussions. Making assumptions about who your audience is (instead of doing research) is the biggest marketing mistake of them all.

Making the assumption that you can get the same outcome as someone who has dedicated their life to digital marketing is not only naive but also disrespectful. Ultimately, don’t assume that your job is done just because you managed to sell something. This is where the fun starts.