If I had a fiver for every time someone said to me that they had tried marketing and it did not work for their business, I would be sitting on a beach somewhere less rainy with a decent cocktail! In fact, I heard these very words today, hence this post.
If you feel your marketing is missing the mark, how can you tell and how can you make your marketing strategy more effective?
Here are the five key signs your marketing needs help.
1. Targeting
Your marketing isn’t targeted at the correct audience
If your marketing plan is pulled together without a specific audience in mind, it won’t appeal to your customers because it just won’t grab them. Furthermore, it may not communicate in a language they understand or show any understanding of their problems.
We try and refocus our clients to think about their customer’s pain points, and less about what they are actually selling. If you don’t communicate to the audience’s needs and emotions, you are wasting your marketing spend and your potential clients will feel they are wasting their time too.
2. On message
Your marketing messages are full of marketing or industry speak!
If your marketing doesn’t sound like it has any relevance to a real people, it will miss the mark by a mile as it will not have any personality.
How often do you see advertising or receive literature telling how wonderful the brand is or exceptional the product is featured – but in a secret language that means nothing to you and therefore does not resonate with you?
By removing any personality or empathy from your marketing messages, it will bore or worse irritate its intended readership. To work, and this means to stimulate some action by the target audience, your marketing message must be lively and understandable.
3. Niche marketing
Your offering is too broad.
If you want to really get your marketing to cut through, your message needs to be specific.
It’s very easy and appealing to believe that if you say you can offer every service in your competitive field, you will get loads of business. However, the danger here is that if you position your product or services like this, the thing that you are really good at is missed, and you become known as a jack of all trades and master of none.
Far better to be known to be an expert in a niche or two and then up-sell and cross sell to other areas of expertise.
4. Be interesting
You are selling solely on features
You can have the most useful product or awesome service in the world but if your marketing is boring, your target audience won’t give it another look.
And people respond to visual stimulus more than any other. Packaging your marketing in paragraphs of text with no photographs, videos or great graphics, is unlikely to get the response you need, to convert prospects into customers.
5. Promoting value
Your marketing is a constant stream of price promotions.
This is the fastest way of killing a business ever devised by mankind. Particularly relevant if you using email marketing. Your prospect list will diminish faster than a chocolate cupcake and if you only promote on price – that will be the only type of customer you will recruit ….cheapskate bargain hunters who are only as loyal as your last great deal.
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