Marketing is a vital ongoing activity in every business. And because we have to be thinking about it all the time, many of us tend to create shortcuts. We find a few marketing techniques, activities, messages that seem to work well, so we make them permanent fixtures in our marketing campaigns.
This is smart on one hand because, after all, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” It can also streamline your marketing activities, save you time and allow you to build on all of the marketing you’ve done thus far.
But on the other hand, with a few unknowing subtractions from your marketing “formula,” this can be the start of a slow and steady death to what was once effective marketing.
Why Marketing Breaks
Here are a few reasons when your marketing, even if it was once successful, can just stop working.
Been There, Done That
When you do something over and over again, you become predictable. And predictability in marketing can hurt you.
Repetition is good in some capacity, but if you’re repeating your message and your techniques too much, it can hurt your impact. You want to build excitement, anticipation and desire for your product or service. If you say and do the same thing to the same people, you may be perceived as boring. Not to mention repetition eventually gets ignored.
Exhausted Supply
How big is your target audience? If you’re doing too much in the same pool of potential clients, you will have the same results as described above. Too much, too often, too soon can hurt your marketing effectiveness.
Not with the Times
Even if your marketing messages are not tied to a specific date, event or other time-sensitive occurrence, if you’re not changing things up often enough, your message will get stale. Not only does the needs of your audience change, but so does the methods you’re using to reach them. So it makes sense that your approach should change, too.
No Analysis, No Change, No Benefit
If you continue to market how you market because its always the way you’ve done it, you know how to do it, and it once worked, you could be setting yourself up for an uphill battle. One of the ongoing parts of your marketing activities should be measuring and analyzing the result you’re getting. Its not enough to say it worked once or even 100 times.
How to Turn It Around
There are a lot of ways to improve your marketing. You can try a new format, expand your target, adopt a new message, go offline, or team up with a colleague. I could go on and on. But one of the most important, yet overlooked, aspects of marketing is figuring out what your target wants. Unless you are marketing in a way that hits your target audience where it counts, you will likely keep hitting the wall.
Ideally, this is a part of the marketing process that should happen well before you even start putting your products/services out there. But it is possible to do it later in the process and recover for future marketing.
My next post will explore a few ways you can put yourself in the shoes of your most desirable clients, see what they see when they look at you, and figure out how to improve it.
Image credit: deyna03
Alyssa GregoryAlyssa Gregory is a digital and content marketer, small business consultant, and the founder of the Small Business Bonfire — a social, educational and collaborative community for entrepreneurs.
