Is marketing failing you?

Marketing can be incredibly powerful for businesses. When done right, marketing can boost awareness for your brand, position your company as the perfect solution for prospective customers and ultimately, drive leads and sales.
But, the hard truth is that marketing doesn’t work always.

Marketing is not a magic wand or silver bullet. There are plenty of ways your marketing efforts can miss the mark. But that’s not what you want to hear when you’re investing in marketing, is it?

It’s important to understand where marketing efforts can get derailed. That way, you can sidestep many of the issues that businesses encounter.
It’s early in the year, and we want to make sure you start your efforts off on the right foot.

So, why are we talking about marketing failure?

Because we want to make sure you avoid these common pitfalls. If you are aware of the top reasons marketing efforts fail, you can sidestep.

· Guessing: Great marketing isn’t an accident. It takes research, educated decisions, testing, tracking, and measuring. Guesswork will leave you customerless and broke.

· Doing what everyone else is doing: Every business is different, and your marketing mix should be too. Following the crowd isn’t going to help you stand out from the competition!

· Listening to salespeople: Marketing is a long-term strategy, not a special advertisement, publication, or website; but every sales rep you come in contact with will try to convince you otherwise. Marketing is a long-term strategy, there is no magic pill, and don’t let a slick salesperson try to tell you otherwise.

· Not asking questions: Question everything about your business and ask everyone you come into contact with as many questions as possible to learn, grow, and constantly improve.

· Doing nothing: It’s simple, if you don’t market your business, you will fail.

· Putting all your eggs in one basket: Marketing is like investing; the more diversified your strategy, the better off you will be. Don’t invest all your time and resources in one medium or on one marketing tool — mix it up.

· Not tracking results: How the heck are you going to know what works and what doesn’t if you don’t track the results? If you’re not tracking, you’re guessing, and we covered that in #1!

· Assuming you have all the answers: Yes, I know: you know your business better than anyone. But do you know marketing? I mean, do you really know everything about how and where to reach potential customers and convince them to buy from you?

· Not talking to your customers: No one knows your value — or faults — better than the people who actually buy from you. Talk to your customers — often. It’ll provide valuable insight and ideas.

· Ignoring your competition: If you don’t know how you’re different from your competition, how are potential customers supposed to? Knowing your competition’s strengths and weaknesses will help you differentiate.

· Not setting goals: Goals keep us on track; they give us direction. Without them, you’re wandering and most likely wasting a lot of time and money.

· Not building an email list: I don’t understand how anyone can market a business in today’s world without an email list! Email is the easiest and most inexpensive way to stay in touch with customers and prospects. If you aren’t building a list, you’re missing out on huge opportunities.

· Not having an opt-in form: Emailing current and past customers is a great start, but what about the people who visit your website, Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn pages and then go away never to be heard from again? Wouldn’t it be nice to engage the serious window shoppers in some way? An opt-in form is a way to do it!

· Selling all the time: We’ve all met the slick, schmooze, sales types, right? And how long does it take you to high-tail it in the opposite direction? Don’t be one of those. An effective marketing strategy eliminates the need to sell all the time.

· Assuming because you have a great product or service you don’t need a marketing strategy: Sure, some products, and services might market themselves, but that’s rare. Real marketing success takes strategy, planning, and work.

Fundamentals of Marketing :

Let’s take a step back and define what the basics of marketing entail and break them into three categories: Talent, processes, and technology.

Talent

The talent that sits within the marketing department is crucial. From a broad perspective, this can include writing, design, and strategy.

Processes

Marketing can be complex with many moving parts. So more than ever, having set processes in place is critical. And whether your marketing team adopts an agile or waterfall approach, someone in the marketing department with a project management mindset is imperative to help develop processes and ensure they are followed.

Technology

Technology can lend a hand to help marketing teams follow set processes. Marketing resource management is crucial for marketers to adopt. This is where you can keep track of workflows and budgets. There are many deadlines and tight purse strings, so with the right technology, marketers can stay on top of targets and use marketing dollars wisely.

Communication Skills in Marketing

Until people come to know about your product, you cannot sell it. So, to popularize your product, you need to communicate with people. Today, there are various techniques of communication that help market a product, improving the product reach, and optimizing business performance.

What is Marketing Communication?

Marketing communications are those techniques that the company or a business individual uses to convey promotional messages about their products and services. Experts of marketing communication design different types of persuasive communication and send them to the target audience.

Market Economics

A market economy is an economic system in which economic decisions and the pricing of goods and services are guided by the interactions of a country’s individual citizens and businesses. There may be some government intervention or central planning, but usually, this term refers to an economy that is more market-oriented in general.

Digital Marketing vs Traditional Marketing

Knowing the difference between digital and traditional marketing is essential as a marketing professional. It’s also an essential skill as a business owner. In managing your brand, you’ll need to be capable of directing both traditional and digital marketing campaigns.

Traditional marketing can include anything from printed catalogs sent in the mail to billboards along the highways. Other, more traditional marketing channels include TV, newspapers, and other forms of print advertising.

Digital marketing, on the other hand, can relate to anything involving marketing through digital channels. These promotions often focus on email and social media. The digital format of the content is what gives this field its name.

As a wide-ranging field, digital marketing also includes content marketing, SEO optimization, paid search, etc.

CATT marketing funnel

There are many ways to succeed in marketing, but using smart techniques makes our work easier. Here we use the CATT marketing funnel. It helps in creating a better market. The formula we use here is Wealth = n^CATT

• C: Content
• A: Attention
• T: Trust
• T: Transaction

Niche: Your success depends upon the niche which you choose. It helps to pick you out from the box. So choosing the right content makes you unique and ranks first among all.

Content: Content creation plays a vital role in marketing. Better content, better result. It has a huge part in driving traffic.

Attention: Driving Attention or traffic towards you is the first step of success. Lead generation is one of the most important parts of the field of marketing.

Trust: If people like you, they will listen to you, but if they TRUST you, they do business with you.

Transaction: Converting leads is a fair core activity of marketing.

Integrated Digital Marketing

Blending all the parts of marketing. People try to specialize and get to succeed in a particular field, but hopefully, that does not result in a passive outcome.

How does Integrated Digital Marketing?

With the combination of all these methods seen above, success is likely to be achieved easier and quick. These methods help us in improving our lead generation and conversion rate. It makes us bloom among the competitors.

Personal Branding

A personal brand is the unique combination of skills and experiences that make you who you are. It is how you present yourself to the world. Effective personal branding will differentiate you from the competition and allow you to build trust with prospective clients and employers. It helps in representing the company at conferences or events, it provides the organization more exposure. Another reason is personal branding is valuable is that the gig in the economy is not going away anytime soon.

Conclusion:

These are the main reasons why many of us spend far too much on marketing but still fail. If you can avoid falling into these traps, you will see a much more significant ROI and stop wasting your marketing money.