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Why Is Your Marketing Strategy Failing?
If you’re putting all your efforts into marketing your company and getting nowhere, it’s probably time for a re-think. Not every strategy will work for every company: instead, actions should be tailored to meet the precise needs of each business based on factors such as their size, customer base and their scope (global or local).
If you’re really struggling and sales aren’t picking up at all, it’s worth hiring a marketing expert to set you off on the right path. Before you go to them, however, it’s time for an honest appraisal of what you’re doing at the moment.
This way you can see for yourself where you might be slipping up. Here are some of the common marketing mistakes companies make:
Over-Ambition: If you are a smaller company with limited resources then you are not going to be able to try out every possible marketing technique there is. If you try to do too much then inevitably you won’t be able to do a thorough enough job on every task you’ve set yourself. Instead, you should be setting yourself a small amount of realistic tasks to focus your energies on. These could be as simple as adapting your website to target your customer base better (and collect data more efficiently), or developing your social media strategy.
No Defined Goals: In some ways this relates to the above point. Even if you have a few ideas of the areas you would like to focus on, you need to have clearly defined targets to meet so there’s something to work towards. It’s no good being vague. It helps if your goals are very specific: for example, you could work on increasing your sales leads by 10 per cent, or on increasing the amount of traffic coming to your website by 20 per cent.
Lack Of Research: Is your marketing strategy designed to target the people it’s supposed to? One of the most common reasons for failure in this area is that companies simply haven’t done their market research thoroughly enough. It’s no good devising in-depth plans if you haven’t first worked out what your customers’ priorities are. Online questionnaires or on-the-street surveys are both simple methods of finding out what will appeal to your client base.
Getting Behind: One of the dangers with a multi-platform marketing strategy is that as soon as you set one thing in train you move on to the next thing and forget about it. But in order for any action to be effective you have to follow up on it regularly. You should be establishing a regular task for each item and carrying this out. For example, if you’re looking to develop a social media presence there’s no point just sending round one Facebook request for people to like your page and leaving it there. You have to keep adding updates to remind other users of your presence.
Too Pushy: This is another of the most common mistakes companies can make: there is a fine line between proactive and aggressive marketing. If you find that your activities are veering into the latter then you are likely to put customers off and they will simply unsubscribe from your emails/newsletters/Twitter feed and so on. Rather than giving the hard sell all the time, you should also be aiming through your marketing to build relationships and share information.
No Results Tracking: If you can’t monitor the results of your marketing activities then how do you even know if they are succeeding? A simple rule of thumb is that if you can’t measure it in some way, it’s probably a waste of your resources. Talk to a marketing expert to discuss the different ways in which you can put properly quantifiable strategies in place.