Joe (part 2)

4 More of Those Costly Marketing Mistakes
By Joe Gracia

To be successful and profitable, you must START using the most effective marketing strategies possible within your overall marketing plans. Less obvious, is the fact that you must also STOP using the most ineffective, money-wasting marketing strategies. While this list doesn't cover 'all' of the possible marketing mistakes, it does describe some of the most expensive, destructive and most 'common' made by many owners of traditional and home based businesses. Here are four more costly mistakes:

5. FOCUSING ON YOU INSTEAD OF YOUR CUSTOMER
It seems natural to tell your prospects about you and your company. We're proud of what we do and how we do it and we 'assume' that our prospects will be impressed and motivated to take action.

'We've been in business for 16 years...'

'We are an award winning, cutting-edge organization...'

'We are equipped with the latest micro-techno, laser-guided, nuclear-activated widget-gizmos...'

Too often these phrases evoke the following responses from prospects:

'So what?'

'Big deal.'

'Who cares?'

Please don't misunderstand. I'm not saying that your marketing materials shouldn't include background information about you and your company and/or specifications about your product/service. I'm saying that this should be 'supportive' information, not your 'primary' marketing message.

It's a costly marketing mistake to think that prospects 'care' about the same things you care about. They rarely do. However, they do care deeply about something entirely different. Once you know what that is, and you address it powerfully and clearly in your marketing, you will begin to draw prospects to you like a magnet.

6. NOT USING EFFECTIVE FREE/LOW-COST MARKETING METHODS
Ask the typical small business owner what marketing is, and he/she will probably reply, 'Advertising.'
What kinds of advertising? 'Yellow Page ads, newspaper ads, magazine ads, radio ads, television ads, billboards, bus cards, Val-Pak mailings, etc.'

While all of these advertising devices can certainly be a 'part' of a successful marketing strategy, there are also dozens of 'low-cost' and 'no-cost' marketing methods available to the small business marketer. By simply discovering and applying these simple 'low-cost,' 'no-cost' methods, you will be able to significantly stretch the effectiveness and profitability of your marketing efforts.

7. COPYING YOUR COMPETITORS MISTAKES
If 'everyone' else is doing it, then it must be the right thing to do. Remember mom's admonition, 'If everyone was jumping off a bridge, would you want to jump too?'

Look at the local, small business ads in any newspaper and you will find the same basic format, same basic message, same basic strategy (see Marketing Mistake #1). . . and the same basic results; little or no response. We feel safe in the crowd. Safe doing what everyone else is doing. We also 'assume' that if it works for them, it can work equally well for us.

Unfortunately, a business's success is rarely from 'one' element in their marketing strategy. Their success is the result of 'many' diverse marketing elements; from their location, to their possible lack of competition, to their 'personality' and 'abundance or lack of' marketing aggressiveness.

But we rarely take all of these strategic elements into consideration when 'copying' our competitors. Copying a single marketing element from a competitor is like reaching into 'their' pile of puzzle pieces, pulling out one piece and then trying to make it fit into your puzzle. It rarely works because your marketing puzzle is unique and each piece must fit 'perfectly' with all of your other pieces.

In addition, whatever success a competitor may be experiencing can often be from a 'few' of their less obvious or 'visible' marketing methods. Often the highly visible element (ad, flyer, brochure, etc.) is one of the least effective. You end up copying the profit losers, rather than developing your own profit winners.

8. DIRECTING YOUR MARKETING TO EVERYONE
Directing your marketing to 'everyone' but to 'no one' in particular guarantees that your marketing will be ignored. Many small businesses have failed to determine who their best prospects are, where those prospects live or how to reach them effectively and efficiently.

This is a critical first step in any successful marketing strategy. By skipping this step, they resort to running vague and generic 'one-step' ads in mass media, such as local newspapers, magazines, radio, television, cable, Val-pak mailings, Internet Web sites, etc. Their 'hope' is that by presenting their 'generic' message about their business to the 'greatest' number of people, the result will be the highest number of sales. Wrong.

Unfortunately for them, effective marketing doesn't work that way. The fact is, in most cases only a small percentage of the readers/listeners/viewers of mass media will have a 'need' for your product or service at any given time.

Some business owners may have a hard time believing this, but nevertheless, it's true. 'Everyone' does not need or want your product or service. By not targeting your marketing to your very 'best' and logical prospects, you are wasting most of your marketing dollars on people who have little or no interest in your product or service.

If there are only 100 'true' prospects for your product or service out of 10,000 possible readers of a publication, why would you want to spend thousands of dollars presenting your message over and over to the 9,900 non-prospects? Yet, this is the method most small business owners choose because they don't know that there is a much more cost-effective and profitable strategy.

- By Joe Gracia (c) Copyright 2000 - Give to Get Marketing

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