Marketing is for real! Marketing in itself is not a waste of money, but many methods of marketing chomp away loads of finance without generating satisfying returns. Most marketing campaigns are not mistakes, but rather poor execution. In our interconnected lives today, it’s clearer than ever that audiences are converted into customers. Therefore, the appearance and feel of the brand are more important than ever.
Branding strategy considers a lot of factors like product or service characteristics, industry-sector, region, demographic characteristics, accessibility, media presence, regulations, and so on. There are many ways in which the marketing efforts fail to give the “bang for the buck” expected.
This is important for a few obvious reasons why good precise marketing is better than just large-budget marketing.
- You can’t expect to make money without spending money, but you can expect to make more money than you spend.
- If you’re a small business or even a business expanding, you don’t have the unlimited funds that larger more known brands have. That means you need to be more precise and effective in your marketing.
- Good marketing brings in new customers that stay customers.
1. Know-It-All Marketing
These days companies get lured by the attractiveness of being digitally visible. Online visibility is a requirement. But, if you get it wrong with respect to your product and the target market, the money gets literally dumped.
Sometimes, organizations do the task of designing a marketing strategy themselves without the help of domain experts. An example of know-it-all marketing is when a business decides to suddenly buy Facebook ads without properly understanding the market or the audience.
It’s important that businesses hire the right marketing directors and companies that understand their specific needs. A marketing business is able to be an expert in marketing because that’s all they do. Your business can’t be an expert in marketing if that’s not all you do, that’s why it’s important to hire the right people.
Many times, it is also noticed that the hired experts are still naïve enough themselves. So, hiring the right professional team can go a long way in ensuring ROI (return on investment) on marketing investments. This DIY technique is a sure-shot way to lose the limited funds that small businesses can invest in marketing. And once the right timing for advertisement and campaigns is lost, it becomes difficult to re-launch the brand awareness and positioning tactics.
Not only can know-it-all be a huge waste of money on marketing, but it can also be a waste of time. If you’re thinking you can do all marketing in-house, it means that there are other responsibilities that you’re ignoring. You’ll have to pull people from different departments to cover, marketing or your responsibilities if you decide to handle the marketing. It’s almost a surefire way to lose money on marketing.
2. Wrong Visibility Marketing
People connect with brands. The brands need to be visible at the right time, at the right place and in the right format. Small businesses neglect the impact value of design in terms of logo, card, web, brochure, banner, stationery, tagline… etc.
For a business to become a brand, there has to be an interesting story to be told. These designs narrate that story. Companies get all these things done in a haphazard way and drain the money spent on it, instead of reaping the benefits of emotionally hooking the potential customers for a long time. The stand-out quotient is lost forever amidst hundreds of companies fighting for customers’ attention.
One solid way to ensure you maximize your ad time is by targeting an audience. Having a target audience will ensure that you don’t lose money on marketing and grow your business. Advantages to targeting audiences are.
- Gets your product in front of customers who want to buy it.
- Maximizes profitability off of impressions. (Impressions can often be misleading if they aren’t from viable customers.
- Helps to grow awareness of your brand in the customer markets where you should sit. If you’re an online retailer selling t-shirts you want to market to people who buy t-shirts, not just to people who buy clothes online. It’s a sense of narrowing down the advertising for maximum effect.
Businesses are unable to gain the intended conversion rates due to the wrong timing of visibility. Several businesses need to start early on building name and goodwill in the market. While some may need to re-position the existing businesses to focus on the new offshoots.
So, even the right kind of marketing at the wrong time can fail to bring in sales. If you aren’t timing your marketing campaigns and targeting key audiences you’re going to lose money on marketing.
3. Helicopter Marketing
Small businesses often resort to short-term or poorly planned marketing strategies. The concept of branding involves carefully building pools of marketing assets that give returns in the short, medium, and long terms. Companies that invest and forget or don’t keep the pace in efforts and set strong call-to-action processes lose all the benefits.
Branding involves pinpointing precision-based and targeted pilot testing, tracking of results, collection and actions on customer response, loss of interest or exit-intent alert, triggers of loyal or potential customers… etc. in the scheme of things.
The fault of helicopter marketing is real. Helicopter marketing is the idea of seeing the whole field from a high aerial view. The problem with this is that it’s almost too much information, you’re trying to market to an entire world rather than the customers who are looking for your brand.
There are ample case studies to support the existence of this flaw of completely disappearing after spending money on an expensive effort. Businesses are left to the mercy of just spending the marketing budgets every year and showing no interest in digging deep within for the results generated.
When a business markets they are left with a plethora of statistics to use for their next marketing campaign or for other ventures. A few of the stats that a business should be looking at are.
- ROI (return on investment)
- Cost per win (expense of sale compared to the expense of marketing)
- Cost per lead (Number of leads compared to the expense of marketing)
- Customer lifetime value (lifetime value of a customer by calculating the customer’s average sale amount by how many items they buy each year by the number of years they remain a customer)
- Conversion rate (how many visitors became buyers)
- Website traffic (Did impressions of your website go up? Did average time spent on the website increase?)
- There are many many more, but these are a few of the most important.
This lack of monitoring and prompt decisions makes even worthy marketing tools useless for pushing the revenues. For example, if a tourism business has launched a contest for attracting potential tourists. What if it does not reap benefits from the data bank of potential customers collected after the contest results?
Marketing is an art and a science. While it digs deep into the world of emotions to hook the customers, it takes a lot of logic and technicalities to convert them into actual sales.
A professional marketing agency goes a long way to bring the jump in numbers of small businesses wish to gain. The smallest of the budgets can be set for ambitious outcomes by taking the help of experienced professionals.
With correct target market research, the right kind of design, messaging, and copy, the results must come. The consistency of conversion rates is something also to do with the perseverance and skills of the marketing and sales teams.
So, avoid getting trapped in the above-mentioned three kinds of marketing and try producing genuine results for your business. It sounds a whole lot better than just spending money blindly and hoping for real results.
There are many ways to lose money in marketing. That may make marketing seem like a scary adventure but in reality, marketing done right is an exceptional way to grow your business, increase brand awareness, and make more money. Marketing can be exciting and challenging and it should be taken seriously. These are a few solid tips to help you and your business increase your effective marketing for the future.
