13 Reasons Why Your Marketing Sucks
Why is it particularly hard to have really good marketing campaigns? Maybe we need to take a good look at ourselves and what we are doing. There are potentially 13 good reasons why your marketing might suck.
I am going to be honest with you. I have probably done business with 180 companies and I have spoken to around 10,000 business owners, but much of the marketing that I see is still rubbish. Everybody wants the silver bullet but no one wants to change.
Right now, especially with the marketplace being so flat, you really need to have an enormous amount of potency in your marketing campaigns. I want to give you 13 reasons why your marketing might be failing. I reckon that if you are currently doing all these 13 points, you have some serious issues. If you can nail all 13 of these, you are probably going to have a fantastic year from a marketing perspective. If you ignore them, then you are probably going to have the same year that you have had for the last 10 years if not worse.
Here are the 13 reasons. As you go through the list, ask yourself... Am I doing this? How can I improve? Which one do I need to work on first?
1. You do not have a plan. I am not a huge fan of big marketing plans. I am not a huge fan of getting an outside person to write your marketing plan. I fundamentally believe that the business owner or the leaders of the business need to write their plan. It is not the plan itself but it is the process during the plan where you find the answer. It does not have to be long, just one or two pages, but you need to know where to go with the end in mind.
2. You have no idea who is your ideal customer. I came from Harvey Norman. Harvey Norman is not a great example of small business marketing because they are Australia’s largest single advertiser. Harvey Norman marketing strategy is the shot gun method. The shot gun method is that you shoot many pellets with the hope that you will hit someone. This advertising method will send you broke unless you have endless amounts of money like Harvey Norman. Today, I reckon that you have to be a sniper. A sniper knows its target before it pulls the trigger. The key is that if you want to build a great business, then you have to focus on who is your ideal customer. Realize that may not be your existing customer because your existing customer may not be your ideal customer.
3. You do not know what compels people to buy something. We do not buy features, we buy benefits. You need to articulate the benefit of buying your product to your target market.
4. You give up too quickly. You do one thing and that is the only thing you do. You believe it is the silver bullet. You do this one thing and then you stop doing it. There is no consistency in the marketing. Marketing is so much about repetition. That is where you build momentum.
5. You have got to know how to milk your own cows. So much of marketing is about trying to milk off someone else’s cows. What I am suggesting is that you need to look at your own farm and see how many cows that you already have and just reconnect with them again.
6. You do not get back to your customers often enough.
7. You do not move customers up the loyalty ladder. I firmly believe that in every business, there are about six levels that you take a customer up. The first level is a suspect. The next is a prospect. Then they become a customer, then a client, then a member, then an advocate and then they become an evangelist. It would be brilliant if you would develop strategies to take your customers, which is what we normally get, and take them up those four more levels.
8. You do not get to the point. Clearly we do not have a long span of attention. A lot of people write like the readers have heaps of time. They do not. If you do not write clearly and get to the point straight away, you will be lost because people will switch off straight away. People want to know what is in it for them. Clearly any headline, any first paragraph, any opening conversation needs to anchor that straight away. The person really does not care about what I sell or market, they only care about how that product will help them, their business or their life.
9. You make it too hard for people to do business with you. Sometimes people just do the most ridiculous things. I went to a restaurant; I wanted to pay for it with American Express. Do you know what they said? "No American Express." Do you know what I said? "No business." I would have probably spent $400 there. The guy said to me that they do not accept American Express because they charge me too much. He has it all wrong. He lost a $400 sale because he did not want to spend a measly 4% merchant fee. Sometimes we do idiotic things like that because we look at the expense and not at the increases that we could get.
10. Your marketing is dead set boring. I do not think that you can be boring in the New World anymore. I think that you have to be entertaining. You have to have character. You have to have personality. It is okay to be a bit weird because weird means that you are authentic in the marketplace. If you are average, you are boring. Who wants to have an average business that has no personality?
11. You fail to test and measure. Einstein said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting to get a different result. Super insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and not even knowing the result that you are getting. Your business cannot be based on tradition.
12. Your timid, conservative and small thinking. Do not catch yourself saying, "No, we cannot do that, it's just too out there." Then there is the common excuse: "What if we get too much business?" That is a good problem to have. See if you can get that problem.
13. Your horse is dead and it is time to dismount.
I hope that when you look over this list, you did not relate to all 13. If you did, then you have got some serious marketing issues. But, if you can fix them up, then you will be doing okay.
And be sure they leave with a smile on their face.
About Achievers Group
The author is founder and Chief Energy Officer of Achievers group. He is a much in demand passionate professional speaker, business educator, author and corporate and business advisor. He has worked with over 170 businesses around the world.
Website: www.achieversgroup.com.au
Email: tony@achieversgroup.com.au
Phone: 0410 538 521
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