A well-tuned marketing campaign is a beautiful thing. Your advertising not only connects with just
right prospects, but it seems everyone is talking about you, your product, or service.Sales come in at a nice pace. Profits mount as you quietly chuckle thinking how little you spent on marketing. Suddenly, moving your company forward doesn't seem hard at all.
Unfortunately, marketing rarely works that easily, at least at first. Rhonda, who is marketing director for a mid-sized business-to-business company, purchased an expensive series of television ads to boost product awareness. "I thought getting our brand in front of so many people would naturally increase sales, but it didn't happen," she laments.
Meanwhile, Ted, working hard to get a home-based business opportunity started, sunk his entire three-month marketing budget into a sales letter to 1,000 prospects. Only a few responded leaving Ted wondering what he did wrong.
Most marketing gets held back by a few very common mistakes. Let's look at a few along with ways you can easily correct them to get your advertising back on track.
Mistake #1: Your marketing gets lost in crowd. Each of us gets bombarded by thousands of advertising messages every day. >From magazines, to radio ads, to a TV talking in background, to flier left on your front door, daily ad barrage continues.
Prospects quickly learn to ignore marketing. After all, most of it has very little to do with their concerns. Prospects only pay attention to marketing that is radically different or marketing that speaks directly to their most immediate concerns.
Highly innovative marketing rarely works. It may be one of most counterintuitive features of promotion. How many of outrageous dot-com ads from 1990s do you still remember?
Instead, separate your ad from pack by making it talk directly to something prospect really cares about. It should point out a problem your product or service can solve.
Make language of your ad sound like way customers would describe problem, solution, and way they feel after problem is solved. This is language that gets attention.
Mistake #2: Marketing targets an audience that is too broad. Before you can address specific concerns of a prospect, you have to narrow groups of people your marketing is reaching.
Ted's sales letter didn't work because list of addresses he mailed to weren't people who had already shown an interest in starting a home-based business. Many were already owners of good-sized businesses. Others were managers in companies with little time or inclination to work from home.
Ted would do better to use a more tightly targeted list of people who had recently requested information on a home-based business or had tried one or more opportunities in recent years.
An ad in your big city newspaper will reach a great many people, but very few will be in market to buy your improvement for offset printers. In this case, your ad would work much better in a trade magazine for printing companies.
TV and newspapers work very well to sell products used by a large, diverse mass of people. You can target TV and newspapers further by putting ads on specialized cable TV programs or in special neighborhood editions of newspapers. Likewise, you can get better targeting and lower rates by placing ads in regional editions of national magazines.
