Common Marketing Mistakes

Are You Making These Marketing Mistakes?

Do you think marketing is the same as advertising? Do you have a formal marketing department that has brand-building leadership and a serious budget to increase your customers’ and prospects’ awareness of your business? Are you competing on price? Are you ignoring your existing customers? We will discuss these important issues today.

Phil’s Profit Points™ in Brief:

• The major areas of marketing include: value to the customer, pricing and awareness.

• The most common mistakes include: the product or service is not designed from the customer’s perspective, pricing is based on cost or competitors and not on value, and existing customer relationships are largely ignored.

Are You Making These Marketing Mistakes?

Here are the most common mistakes that we see in marketing.

Common Mistakes for Value to the Customer

• Many businesses see themselves as a commodity and try to compete on price. They see themselves as order takers or vendors. This is the wrong approach. Companies need to focus on how their products and services improve their customers’ businesses. An industrial service company helps its customers to maximize their uptime, increase revenues and profits, and protect their reputation. What is your value?

• Due to technical training, many professionals and service providers identify themselves with their backgrounds or their methodologies. I was recently working with an expert who was busy wading through his own methodology instead of pulling out the most relevant tools and applying them to my opportunity. Are you forcing your process upon your customer instead of helping them to be more successful as quickly as possible?

Common Pricing Mistakes

• Too many companies set their prices based on their costs or their competition. The problems emerge if their costs are wrong, if the competitors are using incorrect pricing formulae (or are just dummies), or if costs don’t reflect value (they usually don’t). How do you set your prices?

• Companies give their customers one “take it or leave it” price. Giving your customers several tiers or options on how to do business with you will give your customers more control and increase your probability of winning the sale. How many pricing options do you give your customers?

Common Awareness Mistakes

• Many businesses fail to recognize the importance of marketing as a necessary strategy to increase awareness and attract more customers. How effective is your marketing strategy at increasing awareness and attracting new business and repeat customers?

• Since most entrepreneurs have technical backgrounds in whatever their business does, and grow their businesses on the backs of a few larger customers and organic growth, they may not develop sophisticated marketing processes. Once they grow to a larger size and now have capacity sitting idle, they jump straight to a sales focus (to keep their people busy) and ignore marketing. How are marketing and sales driving your business growth?

• Ignoring your existing customers is a common problem. Advertising is expensive and is designed to attract new customers. How do you communicate with your existing customers?

• Businesses don’t ask their existing customers for three things that will help to grow the business:

1. Asking for more business from your existing customer (it seems too obvious)

2. Asking for a testimonial to use on the website and in marketing collateral, and

3. Asking for a referral to one of their peers.

How are you asking your customers to help you grow your business?

In Conclusion

Your marketing effectiveness is the most critical factor to your business growth and profitability. Hiring people and investing in equipment to expand your capacity are easy to do. But just because you’ve built it, doesn’t mean they will come. A comprehensive marketing strategy that increases the awareness of your company and its products and services to your existing customers and prospects is critical to driving top line revenues growth and bottom line profits.

Tough Question

How much of your revenues come from new products and services that you didn’t provide years ago or from new customers that just started working with you? If this number is less than 20%, then you need to ramp up your marketing.

From the Piggy Bank

The more effective that your marketing strategies and tactics are, the less reliant you will need to be on sales. Building your brand is more important – and more profitable – than building your capacity.

Have a profitable week!