It’s easy to think of marketing as primarily advertisements, promotions… getting people through the door and driving sales. It’s easy to forget that marketing is a deep practice of art and science; requiring careful consideration of things like creating demand and highly analytical functions such as precision pricing for optimum profit.
Well, today’s post is a list of three un-“B”-elievable marketing follies. And, what to do about them should you catch yourself tripped up by any one of these very common stumbling blocks.
3 Un-B-elievable Marketing Follies
1. BUDGET.
Is it? Isn’t it? It’s ALL about the budget. Or, is it??? Every business has one. Or, at the very least should and won’t be a business for long without one. The funny thing is, there is a budget for human resources, for equipment, for utilities, for licensing… for just about ANYTHING out there. However, what is very quite common for even established businesses and large corporations is forgetting about the plain need for a marketing budget.
After all, you’ve got to spend money to make money.
Sadly, most organizations fail to invest in their marketing programs and all of a sudden demand to see some type of return on investment (ROI). Well, sure. Everyone wants a healthy ROI. Yet, for those businesses who don’t have established marketing budgets, or worse, have cripplingly low marketing budgets and still demand of their marketing team to turn lead into gold… such mindsets are doomed for failure.
If the majority of your competitors, substitutes, and threats are already demonstrating strong marketing budgets, they are steps and steps ahead. They will, by the very nature of marketing at all, convert more customers and capture a larger marketshare. This will give them a healthier profit margin to work with; to reinvest into their marketing program into a positive cycle of success. This is unlike companies with poor considerations for marketing budgets, demanding ROI on unrealistic amounts of resources to turn water into wine. Such companies will have wasted incremental bits of resources, expecting five star marketing performance out of two star resource input. After several series of this, they will have not only failed to convert and capture; they will also be severely behind the curve and will find themselves in a place where they not only need to dig themselves out of a hole… they are so far behind the race they are likely to be lapped, crushed, or acquired.
If everyone is advertising and you are not; you are automatically at a disadvantage.
2. BRANDING.
Branding is ALWAYS a big “to do” in the marketing world. The topic of branding is typically regarded as some combination of discovering the secret sauce, finding the fountain of youth, and, strategic implementation. Well, the last part is correct.
Intentionally executed strategy is the prime difference in good branding and excellent branding. In branding, focus is everything. Without focus, there is no consistency. And, consistency is the nature of a strong brand. This leads us back to the tweet above. Your content is what your company produces and sells. And, with all sales, you must focus on the perspectives of your consumer base. If you wish for a strong, focused brand… make sure you are focusing your brand identity in a manner which both matches the consumer’s view of your brand image as well as the demands your content fills for their benefit.
If you want to learn how to brand… to do it with clinical precision, please check out the FREE UpDoc Media Branding webinar.
3. BASELINE.
Say you’re ready to act or already in action. You have marketing initiatives in mind. You have a budget. You even set aside a secondary budget should your plans require additional resources. BEFORE you go any further, have you taken a baseline?
It’s common in finances, clinical care, and in basic sciences to take before and after measurements — baselines. Without a baseline, it’s rather difficult to tell any type of before and after effect. Failing to take, measure, and analyze baseline outcomes, customer behaviors, and market response is a great way of robbing your company from invaluable knowledge of your own business, the marketplace, and most importantly, the best opportunities of the future.
Everyone is so eager to see change that many forget to track data long enough to understand if the change was meaningful, significant, auto-correlative, seasonal, trending, etc. So, be sure to avoid this final marketing folly. If you’ve already started, no worries! There is always time to reach back and perform some retrospective analysis. And, even if you’ve gone “too far,” there exists a host of analytics to track meaningful changes, trends, and directions. Just be sure you utilize the right one 😉
Like I said, these three un-B-elievable marketing follies are terribly common. Companies without strategic marketing budgets tend also to lack tactically savvy marketing programs. Blind promotions and untargeted advertisements is just throwing money to the wind. Similarly, companies who are stressed out about branding in a fashion that reaches out to everyone tend to develop a brand that means little to that same audience. After all, if everyone is special, no one is. Finally, be sure you are not guilty of the marketing folly of failing to measure baselines — baselines of your company, your operations, your customer behaviors, your marketplace, everything! In marketing, everything matters… everything is connected. Without properly measured baselines, you’ll never be able to figure out how everything is related, has been related, and is going to be related — which means, it will be difficult for your customers to relate to you.