Home > Marketing Toolbox > 25 Marketing Don'ts!
DON'T DO THESE THINGS - unless you like wasting money on marketing!
Why marketing is getting less and less effectiveEverything goes in cycles. We all know that. The problem is that none of us can think of what might come next in the ‘marketing cycle’. So we stick our heads in the sand and carry on marketing even though we know it is bringing us less and less results.Ads used to work gangbusters!30 years ago when I was selling ads for newspapers, you could at least hope for a result from both newspaper and radio ads – no matter how bad the ad was. Although the advent of lots of start up newspapers and local radio stations made it harder to get a result, 20 years ago it was still worth concentrating most of your marketing spend in local newspapers or radio stations – but you needed to use the Holloway Approach if you wanted a result.But that’s all changed. Sorry!There’s just no way you’re going to effectively market your business if you don’t find other ways to market. Advertising just can’t cut it anymore on its own. In fact there are times when you shouldn’t advertise at all.We still run lots of ads for our clients, but we do LOTS of other things for them too. Those other ‘things’ tend to be harder work, more fussy, but they bring better results. The simple reason that advertising is becoming less effective, and will continue to do so, is the ENORMOUS amount of competition the good old local newspaper and radio station now receive. For a start there’s too many newspapers and radio stations to choose from.Not just for you, but for your customers too. They can’t read or listen to them all! But worse still, (for anyone focusing all their marketing dollars in radio or newspaper) your customers just aren’t as interested in those media anymore.Now there’s much more interesting stuff coming at us all the time. Your customers are getting bombarded with Youtube, Trademe, emails from businesses (and friends), telemarketers, infomercials, books, magazines, letterbox flyers, letters from businesses, dVDs, hundreds of TV channels (that you can’t advertise on even if you want to). All of them are worth a look, some much more interesting than the newspaper or radio. And the answer is NO! You can’t afford to do all those things and be in all those places. That’s the other horrid thing that’s happened - businesses are making the mistake of thinking they’ll need to spend money on all those things. They don’t! You don’t. Remember Michael Hill’s ads? Boy were they effective. These days you’ll see Michael’s stores focusing a huge amount of time on sales training – much more effective, and possibly cheaper than ads in the long run. Michael Hill is just one of hundreds, actually thousands, of businesses who now have to find other ways to market than advertising. The key is not to focus all your marketing money on ads. And not to try and divide it up among all the opportunities because they won’t all work for you. The best way to get results from your marketing is quite simple. Work out which of all those harder work, but better result ways to market (emails, letters, phone calls, sales training etc) work best for you and then focus your attention on just those things. Yes, but how on earth do we work out what’s most likely to work for our business – letters, emails, customer evenings etc, etc?
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