Greatest Marketing Mistakes Essay, Research Paper
The 10 Greatest Marketing Mistakes And How To Avoid Them!
Its a certain fact that business these days is more competitive than its ever been. To stay alive these days, you just cant just offer a quality product at a fair price. These days, you have to know how to market effectively.
Unfortunately, most businesses have no idea of how to get the most out of every marketing dollar that they spend. You should demand that ou get the best results from every dime you drop into marketing! Most companies spend more time planning their company Christmas party than they do creating powerful, persuasive, marketing communications.
Now this can stop. Herein are the 10 greatest marketing mistakes and how you can avoid them. Before I get into it, let me tell you why I put this together.
As I consult with current clients, bring on new clients, and market for more, I am learning more and more. Its come to my attention time and time again, when I bring on a new client I find that they are making almost the exact same mistakes as another of my clients was, in a totally unrelated field!
These marketing mistakes arent confined to a singular industry. These mistakes Ive found across the board. I have worked with computer software companies, food companies, cable sales companies, real estate brokers, financial consultants, and many more. All of these companies had most, if not all of these 10 greatest marketing mistakes present in their operations.
If one or two of these mistakes dont apply to you, then you should congratulate yourself! You must already be on the road to marketing success! Here they are in no particular order:
Mistake # 1: Your business focuses on itself, and not on your prospects and customers needs.
Does this seem too obvious? Look through your yellow pages. Pick them up right now and glance through. Answer this question: Are most of the ads telling you what benefits you get if you if you become a customer? Or are the ads telling you about the vendors, where they are, how wonderful they are, what they do, how great their quality is, how great their service is, and all about them?
95% of the ads are totally focused on the business and
not on what the business can do for YOU, the prospect!
Take a look at the ads in the newspapers, on the TV, and listen to the radio. Youll find the same thing happening there, consistently, every day. This type of selfish advertising falls into the terribly wasteful category of institutional advertising.
Institutional advertising produces, at best, deferred results. At worst, institutional advertising is ineffective, unproductive, and a wasteful expense that accomplishes no profitable purpose whatsoever.
You know when its institutional advertising because institutional advertising tells you how great the company is, or how old and stable they are, or some other frilly, fancy, cutesy and other non-compelling foolishness.
Your selfishness is what kills most of your marketing. From brochures to flyers, and sales letters to advertisements, your marketing message should let your prospects know that you are concerned ONLY WITH WHAT THEY WANT!
Anything about you should always come last. Your clients, customers, patrons, patients…whatever you choose to call them, should always come first.
Any marketing documents you create should start out by focusing on the prospects wants. Every sentence should show that you understand the prospects wants.
Until your marketing efforts focus on the prospects wants, your marketing is handicapped.
Mistake # 2: Failure To Test
Very few companies ever test any aspect of their marketing, and compare it to something else. They bet their destiny on arbitrary, subjective decisions and conjecture. This is unfortunate for a number of reasons.
First, we don’t have the right or the power to predetermine what the marketplace wants and what the best price, package or approach will be.
Rather, we have the obligation and the power to put every important marketing question to a vote by the only people whose ballot counts: customers and prospects.
How do we put a marketing question to a vote? By testing one sales thrust against another, one price against another, one ad concept against another, one headline against another, one TV or radio commercial against another, one follow-up or up-sell overture against another. I could go on and on.
The point is — and this is not guesswork —when you test one approach against another and carefully analyze and tabulate the results, you will be amazed that one approach always substantially out pulls all the others by a tremendous margin. You’ll also be amazed at how many more sales or how much larger the average orders you can realize from the same effort.
The purpose of testing is to demand maximum performance from every marketing effort.
If each of your field salespeople averages 15 calls a day, doesn’t it make sense to find the one sales pitch or package that lets them close twice as many sales and increases their average order by 40%-100% with the same amount of effort?
You can easily achieve immediate increases in sales and profits merely by testing.
Tomorrow, have your salesmen try different pitches, different hot-button focuses, different packages, differently specially priced offers, different bumps or upgrades, different follow-up offers, etc.
Each day review the specific performance of each test approach, then analyze the data.
If a specific new twist on your basic sales approach out-closes the old approach by 25-50%, doesn’t it make sense for every salesman to start using this new approach?
Test every sales variable. Any positive or negative data can help you to dramatically manipulate the effectiveness of your sales efforts.
But don’t stop at merely finding those approaches, offers, prices, or packages that outperform the others. Once you identify the most successful combination, your work has just begun. Now you should find out how high is high!
Keep experimenting to come up with even better approaches that out pull your current control.
Your control is the concept, approach, offer, or sales pitch which has consistently proven, through comparative testing, to be the best performer.
Until you establish your control concepts, techniques, and approaches, you cant possibly maximize your marketing.
Once you find control concepts or approaches, keep testing to see if you can improve on their performance, thereby replacing one control with a better one.
Test your prices. Different prices often outperform one another on the same product by an enormous margin.
$19 has outpulled $25 by 300%.
$195 has outpulled $245 by huge margins.
$295 has outpulled $195 on certain offers, which netted a cool $100 more per sale!
Why does one price outpull another? I dont know. Probably for a lot of reasons: psychological image of value, perception of quality, etc. Every situation is unique, so I implore you to test several different prices. Youll be amazed at the difference in profit and total orders one price will produce over another.
Testing applies not merely to prices, but to every aspect of marketing.
If you run ads in newspapers or magazines, test different approaches, different headlines, different hot-button emphasis, different packages, different rationales, different pricing, and different bonuses on top of the basic offer.
Test different directives to the reader or listener on how to respond and what action to take.
Test positioning in the front, back, right, or left-hand side of the page. Test where your commercials run.
Make specific offers and analyze the number of responses, traffic, prospects, and resulting sales for each specific ad. Then compute the cost-per-prospect, cost-per-sale, the average sale-per-prospect, average conversion-per-prospect, and the average-profit-per-sale against your control. This reveals the obvious winner, the control that you will keep running until a better control beats it.
Remember, salaried salesmen cost you the same fixed amount, whether they make one sale a day, three sales a day or more. An ad costs you the same amount of space, production time, or air time whether it produces 100 prospects, 1,000 prospects, or 10,000 prospects.
Therefore, it stands to reason that you should test different ad approaches and find those that outpull all the others, then use those approaches to maximize your investment.
The suggested order of testing is:
1) Headline
2) Price
3) Offer
You must have a strong headline always!
Your headline is an ad for the ad. If people are not drawn into the copy by a strong, compelling headline, then you have wasted your effort. A headline is not just there to attract attention. It must talk in terms of benefits to the prospect along with a promised solution to a problem.
Test everything starting right now.
Mistake #3: You Fail To Determine Specifically Who Your Market Is And What Their Wants And Needs Are.
Ninety percent of the businesses out there never precisely determine who their market is, and what the markets desire, needs, wants, and passions are.
This is a grave mistake.
The successful marketer can tell you precisely who hes marketing to, and what they want in a product or service. He can tell you the age of his best prospect, who this person is, where this person is, educational and income levels and other critical information. You must know who, then you can find out the why.
Why does your customer buy from you? What do your customers want or need most in the products or services you offer? You need to focus on discovering what the why is so that you can focus your marketing efforts to show your prospects that you can meet the why in the most satisfactory fashion.
Think about it…How can you expect to adequately fill someones needs if you never take the time to get involved and understand them? Yet few companies ever bother to seek to meet their customers needs.
Companies that are a success with their marketing understand their customers needs and attempt to satisfy those needs better than the competition.
If you want to own your market, find out what your customers real wants are. Discover their desires. Search out their passions and needs. Once you have this information you will be armed to corner your market.
Mistake #4: You Fail To Capture Your Customers & Prospects Names And Addresses.
Of all the marketing mistakes to make, I feel that this has caused the loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars every month more than any other. Yet it is by far the simplest mistake to correct!
Why a company would spend hundreds and thousands of dollars to get a customer in the door and them let them walk out without getting their name and address and any other information from them is beyond me! I dont know why, but 90% of the businesses in America dont ever bother to keep track of their loyal customers, let alone any prospects!
Your mailing list, or customer database is your
biggest source of lifetime profits!
Heres why you should keep track of every customer and every prospect:
1) According to Fortune Magazine, it costs 5 times as much to generate a new customer than to resell an existing customer. Existing customers are almost As good as money in the bank!
2) Your existing customers already trust you and know you. Theyve bought from you and (hopefully) have had a positive experience with you. Sales resistance is low.
3) They know youll deliver on your promises, because youve delivered before with energy and promptness(havent you?).
All you need to do is develop a systematic way of keeping track of them, and asking them to buy from you more often. Computer databases are easy to come by, and more affordable than ever. If you dont want to bother with computers, thats OK. Just make up and hand-write on a customer index card, that has your customers name, address, and phone number on it. A simple 3 X 5 card would do nicely. You should also include vital information like: what theyve bought in the past, what theyd like to buy from you, etc. A list like this opens the door to developing a profitable, long-term relationship.
Do you see how valuable this list becomes? When I consult with a business, one of the first things I do is ask if they have a customer list. If they do, then I know I can increase sales dramatically in just a few short weeks.
To make a list profitable, recent studies show that you should contact them once every 21 days. A minimum of once a month.
Here are some ideas for staying in touch:
1) Sponsor some kind of information-based event. A workshop, seminar, luncheon with guest speaker, etc. Anything that would be of interest to your customers and prospects.
2) Send a postcard announcing a private sale with special discounts or added services exclusively for your loyal customers.
3) If you work with businesses, send them information that will help them become more successful(for example, a copy of this report) along with a personal note…I thought you might benefit from this.
4) Send a postcard with problem-solving tips on it for easy, quick reference.
By collecting names, addresses and phone numbers of your customers and prospects, you will be in a position to increase the profits earned from each customer anywhere from 35-200%.
Mistake #5: You Dont Try To Sell Your Customers Something Else On The Back End.
Your hottest prospect is someone that has just bought from you. This is your best opportunity for another immediate sell. The key to successfully doing this is having products that offer solutions to problems that your prospects have. Related problems and related solutions equals increased opportunity for sales.
How simple it would be for the cashiers at the local discount store to suggest another product that may help solve the customers problem. All they have to do is notice how related the products are that the customer is currently buying, and be knowledgeable enough about what the store has to offer to be able to suggest another product that could help the customers problem become solved.
The buyer that just bought from you offers you a prime opportunity to sell again. Your products must be good, however, and you must prove to him that your back-end product will also solve his problem.
Here again we are talking about knowing your prospects wants and desires. Your job isnt over once youve sold your customer his first product. You and your people should constantly be striving to ascertain what problems your prospects have, and then proposing the appropriate solution to it.
If you are focusing on what your customer wants, and are offering them another solution to a related problem, he will not be resistant as you try to up-sell him. He will be grateful for your desire to solve his problems.
Just remember: your customers are never hotter than when they first order. Immediately acknowledge their first purchase and tell them how appreciative you are. And then, offer them something else so theyll have the chance to solve more of their problems and to spend even more money with you!
You should look for logical product or service extensions to offer your customers. Using the back-end will turn one-shot sales into repeat customers. Ironically, most businesses rarely try to sell their current or previous customers anything again. You should do it constantly.
Mistake #6:You Fail To Make Doing Business With You Convenient, Easy, Appealing, And You’re Not Ready To Sell When Your Prospects Are Ready To Buy.
Most businesses almost make it difficult for a prospect or customer to buy from them.
Most businesses do business from 9 to 5. Thats fine. BUT, you must be prepared to do business when your prospects are ready to do business. With technologies that are now available, theres no excuse for business not to have a 24 hour phone service center. Even a simple answering machine can work wonders in this area if utilized as a marketing and sales tool.
You must be fanatical about servicing your customers and causing positive impact on your prospects. You must focus on their needs consistently. Think of how you want to be treated when you do business with someone.
I mean…really think how youd like to be treated. Then, treat your customers in that way.
Most businesses never walk a mile in their prospects moccasins. Why else would they make doing business with them so difficult?
If someone walks into your store, how well versed are the sales clerks? How much time have you spent in preparing dialogs, questions and advice for your people to ask or offer to customers?
If someone calls your company and your switchboard operator is their first contact, can your operator make a motivating, compelling response to the customer or prospects requests?
How willing are you or your people to answer questions and render truly informative advice, even if it sometimes may not directly result in an immediate sale?
How easy is it for your customers to find things in your store?
How well do you keep customers updated on the status of their orders, or back orders?
These are questions that you must answer on a regular basis so that you can keep on top of the flaws your prospects and customers see every time they do business with you.
By making it easy, appealing, and convenient to do business with you, you will attract more customers, and more customers will consistently return to your business.