Marketing: Do You Make This Common Mistake?
A vital function of every business is their marketing operations of every business. Marketing plays a crucial role in every type of business and for every size of business, from a one-person business to a multinational corporation. If there isn’t a well-developed marketing strategy, then there won’t be enough sales to bring in revenue.
In many ways, asking if you’re doing enough marketing is a troubling question. You’re slaving away at your business, doing the best you can to make sure that all departments are running optimally, but you can’t help wondering if you have the marketing down. Here’s the thing: you could be doing an excellent job with, say, administering your business and providing customer satisfaction, but if your marketing department isn’t up to par, then your enterprise will eventually not have enough people to serve.
Here are two questions to ask to figure out how to develop the marketing aspect of your business as optimally as possible to protect the bottom line:
1. Should you use digital marketing or traditional marketing?
While some businesses will benefit more from traditional marketing than others, it’s hard to imagine that your business won’t benefit from digital marketing. Essentially, it’s not a question of which one is better, but what kind of mix would work for you. If, for instance, you have a rehab center, how should you market it? Rehab marketing requires you to do a little bit of each. Using traditional marketing, you’ll want to network, write articles in newspapers and magazines, give talks at service clubs, and even visit troubled communities to offer workshops. You’ll also benefit from digital marketing.
People will want to visit your website to view images of your facilities and grounds, understand your treatment systems, and get to know the qualifications and experience of your staff. In this instance, integrated marketing works well. In other cases, however, when your business is strictly online, say, an eCommerce store, then traditional marketing is not particularly effective as your entire business model is virtual.
2. Will you do it yourself or hire a marketing firm?
Marketing is not easy, even if you simply restrict yourself to digital marketing because traditional marketing is either too expensive or superfluous. A DIY approach is useful if you’re a solopreneur, but the larger your business, the more sophisticated your marketing needs will be. For instance, you’ll need to create plenty of content, including making effective videos and engaging podcasts, and it can be hard to take care of all the technical details yourself or with a small team while still running the other aspects of the business. In that case, you’d be better off hiring the right people to create a marketing team or outsourcing the marketing work. In the beginning, outsourcing marketing to a third party may prove to be the most cost-effective approach.
When deciding to outsource your digital marketing, here are three critical things you need to keep at the top of your mind when deciding on a marketing firm:
- See if they interview you well enough to create a customized, strategic approach. If they aren’t curious about every aspect of your business, then they are going to use a cookie-cutter approach. This will mean that they’ll roll out a few tactics to see what might work. In the long run, this hit-and-miss approach will not serve you well. You want a company that profiles your customers really well, builds awareness, drives leads, and delivers high conversions.
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Make sure you meet the people who will actually be working on your project. Many companies introduce you to their top performers, but then pass on the actual work to an inexperienced team of junior employees.
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Interview the marketing firm carefully. Marketers are fairly good at promoting their own business, leading you to the assumption that if you leave everything in their hands, you’ll do fine. Sometimes this is true, but at other times, you’re just dealing with master salespeople with a polished pitch. The way to peek behind the curtain is to carefully check references, speak with past clients, and see if they have the experience to deliver on their promises.
In conclusion, a common mistake many businesses make is not paying enough attention to improving their marketing. Every business needs customers, and the best way to attract more people is to build out your marketing. If it’s on the weak side, bring it up to par. If it’s good, keep tweaking it to make it progressively better.
