On today's episode I'm gonna be sharing why your marketing may not be working
and I'm going to give you six traps that most businesses fall into that leads
them to waste a whole lot of time, money and energy on really just bad marketing,
so you can avoid that and get better results, more customers, more leads, more
sales, all the things you want from your marketing. Let's get to it.
Hey there my name is Adam Erhart,
marketing strategist and welcome to The
Marketing Show, where we help you grow your business and generate more leads,
customers and sales by making way better marketing. So, if you're interested in
learning the latest and greatest marketing strategies, tools, tips, tricks
and tactics, well, you may want to consider subscribing and hitting that
notification bell. Alright, let's talk marketing and specifically some of the
worst mistakes that I see businesses make when it comes to marketing, which
inevitably leads them to swearing off marketing altogether thinking that it's
just a scam of an industry that nothing works and then they give it up and just
go back to doing things the way they've always done them. 9 times out of 10
the way that they've always done them is kind of a hodgepodge mixture of some
random acts of marketing where they're just kind of doing whatever comes across
their plate or at the very least some sort of very basic strategy that's not
really planned out and doesn't really align with their goals in their market
and all the things that we're gonna get to in just a second.
Also for most businesses a great strategy they are using is referrals and
word of mouth, but the problem here is they're not leveraging these
appropriately, which means that it's essentially not much more than hope
marketing. Basically hoping you get a referral, hoping that someone comes into
the door and really that puts you at a massive disadvantage when it comes to
generating new customers and revenue on autopilot or on demand or whenever you
need it, because really you're at the whim of other people to deliver those
referrals to you. Alright, so that wasn't actually one of the mistakes that I had
intended on talking about but it is important, so make sure we file that away
and we can talk about it in another episode on another day, but for now let's
get to the massive mistakes I see most businesses making. Biggest mistake #1
is failing to identify an ideal target market and we've all heard this
before, if you've been in business for any length of time that you know you
need to have that ideal customer avatar, that perfect person or perfect
prospector, ideal client or customer that you're trying to attract with your
marketing. I'm sure you've heard the expression that if you're marketing to
everybody you're marketing to nobody, because what that inevitably leads to is
really bland and boring and kind of vanilla type marketing messages and this
is just absolutely disastrous when it comes to creating marketing that
actually impact someone and sort of creates that emotional bond and gets
them to take action, because if you´re just saying really bland and boring and
generic terms, like pretty much all of the competitors in your space are doing
as well, well, you don't stand out, you don't make that connection and therefore
your marketing just fails. This is why step #1 by far the biggest
mistake is that you really have to dial in and focus on kind of that ideal
person that you're trying to reach with your marketing. Talking about their
demographic details like their age, their gender, their income, their occupation,
their geographic details, like what city or state or province or country that
they live in and their psychographic details like what are their attitudes,
their interests, their beliefs, organizations or groups or affiliations.
Basically, all the kind of mental stuff that you're gonna be able to use to
better connect with them and better create messaging that resonates never
gets them to trust you in your business. But if you don't know who you're talking
to, well, you're not gonna know what to say which is why most marketing falls flat.
Alright, let's move on to mistake #2. Mistake #2 is that
once you've got this ideal customer in mind, well, it's failing to reach them
where they are and essentially what this comes down to is little more than
ignoring or completely disrespecting changing trends in consumer media
consumption. It's a bit of a mouthful. But essentially all it really means is that
by failing to really understand how your ideal target market likes to engage and
interact with brands and businesses and content in general, well if you fail to
recognize where they are you're gonna end up on all these kind of dinosaur
platforms places like the newspaper and the radio or maybe using the phone book.
All these mediums that used to be really effective five, ten, twenty, years ago but
really now are just outdated and are not going to deliver the best bang for your
buck. Now, a more modern example would be simply finding where your customers are,
accepting that they are online but then failing to identify which platforms and
which channels are going to be best and best in alignment with your brand your
business and your customers as well. Talking about things like maybe
misidentifying that they're on Facebook or Instagram or YouTube or Twitter or
Pinterest, all of these things, like really, if you sort of mislabel them or
mislabel your customers and think that they're in the wrong bucket when really
they're over here, well, you're gonna miss the mark completely and you're gonna end
up marketing or what I call the "wasteland". Essentially dumping a ton of
time and money and energy in to a platform where none of your ideal
customers are. So it really makes sense to take a step back, identify the ideal
customer, where they're active, so you can devote more of your time and resources
there. Alright, so the next mistake is failing to make an extraordinary or
irresistible offer. Way too many businesses and brands blame Facebook ads
for not working, when in reality the problem is is that they're putting out
an ad that has an offer that nobody really wants. You see, it's not that they
don't want your business, it's not that they don't want your product or your
service and it's not that you don't do a good job. It's just that you failed to
frame it in a way that actually makes it irresistible or attractive to the market
in order to get them to take action. This is a massive mistake I see way too many
businesses make, especially when we're trying to uncover their key points of
differentiation or how they're better than their competitors in the space. All
too often they use words like higher quality or better service or we deliver
a better product and the bad news here is that's pretty much what all of your
competitors are saying. So if you're saying that too, well it really just lumps
you in with them and it doesn't differentiate you at all, your customers
have heard this before and nobody takes any action. This is why one of the keys
to marketing, specifically when we're talking about advertising, you've got to
have an irresistible offer, you have to have something that's in alignment with
your target market that they deem absolutely worthy of clicking on or
taking action on or basically coming into your store or engaging with you in
some way shape or form. Alright, now one of the next biggest mistakes I see when
it comes to marketing is failing to be consistent and we've all heard about
consistency and how important it is that we've got to show up day-in day-out,
create consistent content and all of those things for all the different
platforms and this advice is true, for sure, but the reason behind it that has
little to do with essentially kind of training people to show up and expect
your content and more to do with the fact that we really just need to
increase customer touch points, which means we've got to give the customer
more opportunities to engage and interact and experience your brand of
business. You see, it's really rare that a customer is just gonna come across your
business and automatically want to do business with you,
give you money, so what you've got to do is you've got to build that know like
and trust factor and the way we do that is by showing up in front of them again
and again and again and and again and again and basically,
providing as much valuable, relevant and informative content as you possibly can.
Running one ad and then calling it quits or writing one blog post and then never
posting again or logging into Twitter and making a tweet and then not showing
up again for three years, well, that's inconsistent and therefore it's not
going to deliver results. It's not marketing's fault, it's the inconsistency.
Now, of course it's easier to be consistent on a platform that's actually
in alignment with your values and your brand and your business and your
customers, this is why it really all boils down again to identifying that
ideal customer avatar, finding the platforms that their relative heir sort
of active on and then going there with relevant and valuable information.
Alright, so the next mistake is failing to fully appreciate the customer journey
and I see this all the time, especially with novice advertisers who go out there
and create an ad and they just go straight for the kill, they make a really
hard offer and a really hard pitch right off the bat too call traffic, meaning
someone that's never heard of you, doesn't know who you are and therefore,
well the campaign kind of falls flat. The analogy I like to use here is it's kind
of like proposing marriage on the very first date, well that old expression "it
can't hurt to ask", well, in reality yeah can't hurt to ask and especially if you
ask way too soon and way to kind of forthcoming and really just go out there
and say it out loud. A much better strategy is to slow things down, really
take into consideration the customer journey and what kind of touch points
they're going to need to have with your brand and with your business in order to
build up that trust in order to want to do business with you and really want to
engage because that's what this is about. Really Marketing is about getting people
to want to come to us rather than always having to go out there and force our
message down their throats. So, my takeaway advice here is actually pretty
simple: make sure you still do have that hard
offer, that direct offer that says buy now or give me money or do business with
me whatever that is, but also make sure you've got a soft offer or a
transitional offer that allows somebody to sort of get introduced to you and
your business and your world without having to hand over any money. This could
be something like a lead magnet where you give them something of value that
they can download in exchange for their email address, could be video content
that you just put out there for people to consume,
like this, it could be an email newsletter that you send out that
provides tips and helpful advice, basically something that doesn't require
a large commitment from your audience, but it allows them to get a ton of value,
see what you're about and then maybe they'll do business with you in the
future. Alright and the next biggest mistake I
see with marketing that leads to it leading to incredibly dismal results is
failing to track the marketing results, essentially this is kind of the nerdy
part but it has to do with accountability and metrics. There's that
old expression by John Wanamaker that says "half my advertising budget is
wasted. I just don't know which half" and well he was kind of right there
right? Back in the day we didn't have these good tracking tools to figure out
what was gonna work and what wasn't and where leads and sales were coming from
and we didn't know if this one campaign was gonna work or this campaign was the
winner, essentially it was kinda just a guessing game and we now have access to
tons of data. In fact, way more than you could probably ever want, which means
that you've really got to simplify things and just take a look at kind of
the overall picture and structure of where your marketing dollars are going,
what you're anticipating to get back in return and then making sure that you've
got those accountability metrics in place to track your results. This could
be really basic things like return on investment which essentially is how much
did you spend and how much did you get back. But it could also be what I call
diagnostic metrics, looking at things like cost per click, basically how much
is it costing for someone to click on your ad and get over to your site, could
be click-through rate, basically looking at the percentage of people that see
your ad and how many percentage of them click-through to it. If you get more
advanced you could even start looking at things like cost per lead how, much is it
costing you to acquire a lead and ultimately, the number I'd love for you
to get to, is cost per customer acquisition, basically how much does it
cost you to acquire a customer with different channels, because when you
figure this out well you become profitable very quickly because you're
able to determine if the cost to acquire a customer is less than the lifetime
customer value well you've got a positive ROI. Alright, so the next thing
you're gonna want to do is check out these two videos right here: One is on
Facebook advertising and the other is on Instagram marketing. Now, the beauty of
Facebook and Instagram is that pretty much regardless of your target market,
who you're trying to reach, one of these platforms is going to be a good fit for
your business. So, make sure to check those out
and I'll catch you next time, on The Marketing Show