I’ve been assisting a number of companies with marketing recently and have found the elephant in the room nobody is talking about. I’m sure you’ve seen it and it may have even annoyed you. But few have spotted it as the really major barrier it is.
True Story Illustrates the Point
How Do You Market Your Business?
I had a meeting today with a veteran business professional who exemplified the problem.
She really just needs a couple of the right clients to totally make her dreams come true. She has expertise in marketing and is flanked by others who are very bright on the subject of marketing. She’s a founding member of her trade association and is exposed to what others in her profession are doing. She has a website, is active on social media, spends hours on the phone every day, follows up with current and old leads. She works from early to late and has a LOT going on with her marketing.
It would be easy to believe that she had it all covered. But she reached out to me for help with her marketing. Why?
Marketing Has Become too Complex
The number of moving parts in a marketing department are staggering.
If you wanted to know how to generate good leads, what are your choices?
Frankly, your marketing choices are almost endless. And THAT is the problem. In fact, it’s the biggest problem and provides an almost insurmountable barrier.
Here’s how it works. You need leads. So you look around for ways to get them. When I was Marketing Director in a Beverly Hills ad agency in the days before the Internet, it was simple: TV, radio, outdoor or print.
We specialized in print, which included direct mail, newspapers, magazines and yellow pages (that was a fat phone directory, for those millennials who never saw one).
Today newspapers are a dying breed, magazines offer their own complexity of online and offline editions and hybrid online campaigns. Direct mail campaigns have mostly become part of a more complex hybrid that includes online and multiple other advertising methods. Add in online marketing and the options multiply by a million.
What’s wrong with this? It’s super-confusing!
So Many Marketing Actions You Can’t Focus
Did you realize that confusion is the basic cause of stupidity?
If you feel increasingly stupid in the subject of marketing, realize that you’ve been subjected to an astounding amount of confusion. It’s confusion that is your enemy.
The number of software programs and apps available to do any marketing task are mind boggling. If you just wanted to track what visitors do when they come to your site, you’d have at least two dozen options and it would take hours, perhaps days, to fully research and select the best one to use. In 6 months, they’re no longer the best. In another 3 months, they’ve changed their pricing, so they’re no longer the best deal. In a couple of years, they haven’t kept up with the market and changes in Google result in your site being penalized because you use that app. And you have to do the entire research project all over.
And just how many of these research projects are there, David?
There are literally dozens if these kinds of projects. So what do you do?
We have to strip marketing back to the basics.
We have to analyze what you have done and find what’s worked. Maybe you don’t find much that’s working now, so we must find what’s worked for others, even your competition. Then we have to narrow the focus to THAT and get really good at it!
How important is it to get this done NOW?
The noise in the environment is constantly increasing — the problem is getting worse. You know success is a moving target, but it’s being achieved by many right now, so if you’re not where you want to be, I recommend you start today!
Call David Sanders Today!
I’m offering a complimentary 1-hour in-person or Zoom (video) conference to help you evaluate your marketing and guide you in achieving your goals for your business and life.
That could be all it takes. Give me a call at: 727-304-5000
