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How To Correct Common Marketing Mistakes
Author: Kevin Nunley
A well-tuned marketing campaign is a beautiful thing. Your
advertising not only connects with just the 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 the crowd. Each of us
gets bombarded by thousands of advertising messages every day.
>From magazines, to radio ads, to a TV talking in the background,
to the flier left on your front door, the 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 the
most counterintuitive features of promotion. How many of the
outrageous dot-com ads from the 1990s do you still remember?
Instead, separate your ad from the pack by making it talk
directly to something the prospect really cares about. It should
point out a problem your product or service can solve.
Make the language of your ad sound like the way customers would
describe the problem, the solution, and the way they feel after
the problem is solved. This is language that gets attention.
Mistake #2: Marketing targets an audience that is too broad.
Before you can address the specific concerns of a prospect, you
have to narrow the groups of people your marketing is reaching.
Ted's sales letter didn't work because the 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 the 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.
Mistake #3: Your ad budget gets blown in a one-shot marketing
gamble. This is one of the most common and often heart-breaking
problems. A new store will spend everything they have on one
radio remote, full page newspaper ad, or direct mailer. If the
first try doesn't work (and it often doesn't), there is no money
left for a second or third try.
Which leads us to the next mistake.
Mistake #4: Marketing isn't consistent. The old saying among
veteran marketers is the first ad never works. You get
consistent, long-term results by continuing your ad over weeks
and months.
It may be true that familiarity breeds contempt, but not in
marketing. Familiarity develops awareness and confidence in
prospects so they buy.
There are endless examples of a small inexpensive ad that
appeared in the local Sunday paper every issue for years. Sales
started slowly, then built to a constant roar.
I'll never forget the owners of an auto parts supplier who
strongly believed if the ad didn't pull astounding results
the first time, there was no use in continuing. They bounced
from ads in one publication to ads in another with little to
show for their effort.
Mistake #5: Marketing fails to tie different media together.
Too many times the direct mail campaign a company does has little
to do with the magazine ads they are running. Instead, make your
ads in different media all relate to each other.
Take the audio from your TV commercial and adapt it for a radio
spot. Use a still from the TV commercial in your magazine and
newspaper ads. Take the still photo and some of the verbiage
from your spot and use it in a direct mail campaign.
The continuity will increase your chances of breaking through the
marketing clutter to really reach prospects.
Keep in mind different media work in different ways,
accomplishing some things better than others. Television SHOWS
how your product or service works. Radio helps people know the
FEELING of using your product. Newspapers and magazines are good
at EXPLAINING how things work. Direct mail utilizes the power of
the letter to talk to your prospects in a very personal one-on-
one way.
Mistake #6: Finally, don't belive the hype that the Internet is
somehow dead or dying. USA Today recently reported the number of
people using the Web has doubled since the Internet Boom in
1998.
Huge numbers of consumers and businesses worldwide now understand
the Web is a wonderful place to find a large variety, get things
done fast, and uncover a lower price.
Use your web site to give visitors all the information they need
to understand and buy your product or service. Have your TV
spots, radio commercials, print ads, and sales letters all send
people to your web site where they can spend as much time as they
need perusing your in-depth material.
Marketing is one of those aspects of life where the tried-and-
true often works best. Use these proven solutions to common
marketing mistakes to insure your advertising and promotion
efforts bring the results you expect.
About the AuthorKevin Nunley provides marketing advice, copy writing, and
promotion packages. See his 10,000 marketing ideas at
http://DrNunley.com Reach Kevin at mailto:kevin@drnunley.com or
801-328-9006. ...
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