Struggling with your marketing strategy? Have you tried dozens of marketing tips and ideas that have left you disappointed with the results? As a business owner, you’re likely to have been given the same few tips such as, focus on networking, send out direct mail and use TV ads. Even though you may hear these marketing tips all the time, they’re not actually marketing tips at all. In fact, they’re classed as marketing vehicles. Marketing vehicles are solely methods of delivery for your marketing messages.
If you’re finding that your marketing material is not engaging with your audience, look to your marketing strategy rather than your marketing vehicles. Your marketing strategy is the key to producing great results from your other marketing elements. The phrase marketing strategy may sound confusing, but it is essentially just a general plan that ensures you produce great results from your marketing.
An unbreakable strategy
One mistake that many businesses make is trying lots of marketing vehicles with a weak strategy and realise they’re not achieving the results they want. To generate the level of income that you wish to bring in, you should learn an effective strategy and apply it. Once you’ve put your marketing strategy into play, your marketing vehicles, such as ads and other content, should then bring in the results that work for you.
It’s important to ask yourself, ‘does my marketing strategy generate results?’ If your answer is no, it’s time to implement a strategy that will allow your marketing vehicles to succeed.
Poor strategy = poor results
Let’s look at a useful example that helps explain why strategies are so important.
An ice-cream stall believed that their customers were aware that they sold items in bulk, as well as individually. However, the stall has never promoted this as a selling point to their customers. The ice-cream stall was under the illusion, that because they had been running for over 60 years, that all their customers knew their entire menu.
The issue with the ice cream stall was that their strategy was to wait for customers to ask for their products. This is an example of an ineffective strategy that could be responsible for big losses for the business. If a customer isn’t buying all of your products, this doesn’t mean they do not want them, it could mean that they aren’t aware of everything you sell.
Break the cycle
If your marketing strategy sounds like George’s, it’s time to make a change and break the cycle of ineffective marketing strategies. If you don’t change your strategy your results will never change, but implement an effective strategy and you will instantly see better results. The biggest takeaway from this is that you must change your marketing strategy if you’re not seeing results.
Need help creating a more effective strategy? Get in touch with Action Coach today.
