Dear Business Owners, Your Marketing Sucks
If you've been in business for a while now, chances are your product is good. Hell, to survive as long as you have, your product must be damn good. You've spent time building a skill set that allows you to deliver only the best for your customers. All you need is to get your product in front of a larger audience. If you're reading this, you must have a suspicion that your marketing is not doing enough to achieve that audience.
While I don't know the specifics of your industry, I do know the fundaments of good consumer marketing. This article will outline the common mistakes I see business owners make and how to fix them. Read on, and I'll guarantee you'll get something from this article.
Your marketing and content are random.
Do you have a plan for your marketing? What are you trying to achieve? Marketing should have a definite goal. In general, consumer marketing content should achieve one of three goals:
1. Introduce customers to your funnel.
2. Facilitate customers through your funnel.
3. Maximize customer lifetime value.
When content does this, it becomes a digital asset. The Insight Projects team has written a Marketing Minute about content versus digital assets, and you'll be able to find more in my marketing fundaments book coming out later this year.
Here are some tried and true techniques to achieve these goals:
· Define a problem and position yourself as the resolution.
· Post entertaining content. Engagement builds on itself.
· Provide value in every post. Teach, give, engage, and create. Establish expertise.
· Stay at the top of your customers' minds by engaging them on their preferred platform (your brand should be available on multiple content hosting platforms).
Your marketing is boring.
In this day and age, unless you're a musician, customers are first interacting with your marketing visually. This is especially true for digital marketing. No matter how good your writing is, stimulating visuals can only help. When posting, ask yourself, would you want to click on the post? Keep in mind, everything you post is a representation of your brand. As much effort as you have put into your product, you should try to make your content look like it took the same level of care.
If you struggle with amazing content, you should outsource to someone who can highlight your brand in a way you love.
Your marketing is not connected.
More than ever, customers expect brands to be available when and where they want. That means maintaining multiple content hosting platforms — social media sites, your website, a blog, guest blogs, etc. These platforms need to be connected and tried to a defined goal. Ads should direct customers to a specific point within your funnel. With tools like Linktree, it's never been easier to maintain a connection between platforms and tie the platform back to organizational marketing content goals. Additionally, with management tools like Hootsuite, posting and supporting multiple platforms does not need to be more complicated than the effort required for only one platform (although each platform can, and sometimes should, have its own strategy). With today's web analytics tools, it's so easy to monitor and judge marketing effectiveness.
You run your marketing.
It took you years to build enough skill and know-how to start your own business. Your time and effort are going into developing and delivering a fantastic product. Without more time in the day, you do not have enough time to keep up on marketing best practices. Hiring marketing experts will have an outsized ROI compared to your efforts. When your business becomes successful enough to keep you busy full-time operationally, you should seriously consider hiring marketing professionals. Whether this comes from in-sourcing or outsourcing comes down to budget, timelines, and personal expertise. Look out for our marketing fundamentals book later this year for more insight.
You don't truly understand your customers or your product.
This may be the hardest to hear.
All purchases are emotional purchases. Read that again. All purchases are emotional purchases.
Every consumer makes purchases based on the stories they tell themselves. These stories are emotionally formed. If you don't have a fundamental understanding of what makes your customers emotionally tick or what emotions your product applies to, then you will never achieve the sales you could otherwise. Once you understand your customers' emotional needs and how your brand appeals to those needs, you can maximize your revenue.
Marketing is hard.
Despite doing your best, marketing is just hard. There's so much to maintaining a successful marketing plan, and with the majority of your time being tied up in operational duties, it can be hard to stay on top of marketing. Don't stress your marketing. Hire the experts. If you need help with your marketing, reach out to me personally at brett.adams@InsightProjects.co. I love connecting with business owners. I will do everything I can to help you at zero cost. If you need more help, we can take the following steps to engage my whole team of experts to maximize your marketing impact.
