Is marketing efforts too much for small business?  Those who are "Mom and Pop" type operations typically get overwhelmed with marketing.  Trying to do too much among all those channels of marketing (social media, advertising, print as well as on-line) can get very confusing and costly.  Small businesses will spend over 20 to 30 hours a week allocating not only the employee but the owner as well.  Trying to be everywhere they think their customers are is a crap shoot unless the small business steps back and research their place in their market share.  Multi platform marketing as a small business owner takes patience and you may be surprised you don't need to cross-channel at all depending on your location, your competition, and your customer base. 


If you are dishing out money to market professionals to help you promote your business and not seeing an effective ROI on your investment or trying to do it all yourself with that same negative result then you are obviously spinning your wheels and wasting good hard-earned money.  If you are not engaging a professional your errors could include:


Not knowing how to use the tools


Spending too much time


Your customers are not on the channels you selected


Not measuring the analytics correctly


Social Media platforms and advertising outlets is not a drop an ad here and a tweet their type of marketing.  You need to know your customers and what you are selling and to whom.  If you are paying a firm or agency to do it for you with a negative ROI then you need to sit down with them and find out why.  If you are doing it yourself with wasted hours of a small base of clients looking at your sites then ask your customers directly what they want or survey them.  Marketing for small business does not have to be painful just effective.  Take a few steps back and breathe.  Then take baby steps.