Article Title: Troubleshooting Your Marketing Author: Alfred J. LautenslagerContact Author: al@market-for-profits.com
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Article:
Troubleshooting Your Marketing
© 2002 Market For Profits – Al Lautenslager
Troubleshooting marketing is almost reverse of planning your marketing. Think of all those things you would do in marketing your business, products or services, itemize them and analyze each one to see whether they are working or not. Once you understand these components, they can be isolated, changed if necessary and re-tested for contribution significance.
Usually when you feel that marketing ins not providing some results or results you had hoped for, it is due to one of 4 primary marketing components, and guess what? It is not one of 4 P’s.
The 4 components to isolate, analyze, fix and test are:
· The message
· The vehicle
· The consistency of message
· The target audience
Let’s review each component.
The Message
Although sometimes subjective, you must check to make sure that message is clear, concise and attention getting to your audience. Does it create interest, desire and is there a call to action? Does message relate to you, your company, product or service or does it relate to challenge that you are offering solution for? If all is in order and message is convincing or purposeful, consider on of other components. Sometimes there is one or more message that is ideal for respective marketing situation. It is still ok to test messages. Testing always is a tradeoff to what’s working now. If message you have is working now, it may be reaching your goal and you may decide not to mess with it.
The Vehicle
The definition of a vehicle is something that takes you somewhere. If it is not taking you somewhere and you want to go, you need to change vehicles. The same thing applies to your marketing. You may be using a nice letter in an envelope that appears as promotional in nature and is automatically discarded by receiver when a postcard would do job and be more effective. You might be trying to use television advertising when radio would be better. This is common in business to business market. Another vehicle that sometimes is ineffective is a sales person with poor appearance, poor demeanor or poor selling skills. That would be wrong vehicle to carry your marketing message to your customer/prospect. In today’s world of technology, different audiences require different medium as compared to marketing of yesterday. This all has to be considered. If its not working and you know you have right message for right audience but its not getting communicated, change vehicle, test its effectiveness and make necessary corrections to optimize your marketing.
The Consistency of Message
This really has to do with frequency your message is communicated to your target audience. Someone once said to me, “I tried direct mail once and didn’t get any business.” There are all kinds of statistics out on how many times someone must be exposed to you or your message before they take action. Once is certainly not ideal. Most will say 6-8 times while others have said even higher. This being case, have you given your message a chance before you stop or change it? Usually person that tires of message first is marketer him/herself. Usually target audience doesn’t remember like sender and still has potential for impact when receiving message. Does this mean once a day, you communicate your marketing message? Usually not but sometimes you see or hear something related to consumer brands daily, e.g. Coca-Cola. This must be measure against audiences tiring of your contacts and effectiveness. In case of direct mail, once per month is probably optimal. In case of direct sales, it depends on sales cycle, stage of relationship and magnitude of sale. Different audiences will require different frequencies of messages. Each must be evaluated as to optimum effectiveness. If it’s not enough, change it. If it’s too much, change it. Consistency and frequency is just one more component to be evaluated when troubleshooting your marketing.
