6 Reasons Why You Might Be Failing At Marketing
Marketing is one of the vital elements needed in operating a business smoothly and efficiently. But there are a lot of people out there who fail to understand the fundamentals of marketing and how it works. If you’re one of them, don’t worry you’re in the right place because I got you covered. Here are 6 Reasons Why You Might Be Failing At Marketing:
- You Don’t Understand The Law Of Marketing
Marketing is about values and core values. People don’t buy what you do or how you do it; people buy why you do it.
It’s a very complicated and very noisy world out there. No company is going to get a chance to get people to remember much about them. So you have to be really clear and specific on what you want people to know about your company, and the way to do it is to not talk about why your product is better than anyone else in the market. But to let people know who you are and what you truly believe in at the core of your heart and why you sell what you sell.
Remember, marketing is not just about creating some fancy creative ads to sell a product but, it’s a game of perception. So focus on building a strong perception of you and your company in your customer’s minds to make selling superfluous.
2. Build Your Tribe Before You Even Start Building Your Product
Never start with the product and figure out later where to sell it!!!
People make this mistake all the time. You have to start with the customer experiences and the dilemma customers are facing and then work backwards to building the product. Start with understanding the customer and customer’s needs that leads to building a product that fits, and then you market it with the right message to the right person at the right time to allow the natural sales to happen. Never let marketing become more important than the product. A great product sells itself.
Marketing is not just about selling. It is also about keeping an existing customer happy by communicating with them so that they can remain a customer for life.
“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself. The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous.” — Peter Drucker
3. You Undervalue The Importance Of Great Communication Skills
Great marketing is all about communication. It’s about finding a way to clearly communicate your message to your target audience in an effective way that they can understand. Great marketing is not about using sophisticated high profile English but being able to articulate your message to people around you in such a way that they can understand.
Good communication doesn’t care about vocabulary or grammar. The only question that matters is, “Am I Able To Articulate My Thoughts In A Way That People Around Me Can Understand?”. If you can do so, you’re a pretty damn good marketer.
One of the things you can do to better communicate with your audience is to join a conversation in people’s mind. It’s a very effective way to get people’s attention, and being a marketer, you’ve to learn to get people’s attention.
Another thing by which you can improve your communication is writing. Write a lot. Write every day to slow down your thought process and get more and more clarity in the way you communicate to people.
4. Understanding Digital Marketing v/s Traditional Marketing
Digital Marketing is more of a toddler when compared to the traditional marketing media. It has yet not reached the potential that traditional marketing has been showing us for decades.
If a product is generic with very wide targeting — TV Ads can reach millions at a very low cost. If we talk about India, it has TVs in 197 million homes out of 298 million homes. With an average of 4–5 members per household, TV has a reach of 800 million to 1 billion people. Radio has a reach of 65% of the Indian population while the newspaper has a reach of 465 million people.
The reach of Digital Marketing is nowhere close to TV, radio or newspaper based on numbers alone.
Yet digital marketing has its perks. It is the best medium to reach the affluent English speaking population of India with a spending power ~ 100 Million Users.
Another advantage of digital marketing over traditional marketing is that of using INTEGRATED DIGITAL MARKETING APPROACH.
Integrated Digital Marketing is the art and craft of using all the digital marketing methods available today in such a way that each digital marketing channel complements the other by playing its strengths and the whole is always better than the sum of the parts.
5. The Secret Of CATT Marketing Funnel
Wealth = n*CATT
n = NICHE (Your success & wealth depends on the niche you choose)
C = CONTENT (Create valuable content that attracts people from your niche. Blog, posts, videos, lead magnets, live webinars etc.)
A = ATTENTION (Drive attention/traffic to your content using SEO, Social Media, Paid Ads and Referrals)
T = TRUST (Build trust with your audience with tripwires, marketing automation and retargeting)
T = TRANSACTION (Convert your leads into customers with natural sales method)
Understand the importance of selecting the right niche because when you choose the right battlefield and you’re already halfway there towards victory. The next step is understanding the importance of the above given secret formula to determine your success.
6. Failing To Build A Personal Brand
Have you ever wondered what people buy in brands like Apple or Tesla? You might be thinking that the reason being is that they’re the best in the market. But YOU’RE WRONG!!! When people buy an Apple or Tesla they don’t buy into the best product, but they buy into the PERSONAL BRANDS, i.e. they buy into Steve Jobs and Elon Musk.
But a lot of people fail to understand the relevance of building a strong personal brand. The reason I’m stressing so much on building a strong personal brand is that people want to hear from people and not giant ugly corporates. Let me give you an example, Elon Musk has a greater following on social media than SpaceX and Tesla. A tweet from Elon Musk creates greater influence and impact than a tweet from SpaceX or Tesla.
Now, even a great personal brand needs to go through a process of evolution to create a strong foundation and greater influence. This evolutionary process requires them to follow the 6-simple steps given below:
CONCLUSION
There’s no point in spending tons and tons of money on marketing if you really don’t understand how it works and how to run a successful marketing campaign. Every company needs to understand marketing and get personally involved in creating their marketing campaigns rather than outsourcing the entire marketing area to some Ad Agency.
I’m grateful to all of you for taking your valuable time and energy to read this article. I hope you received some value from this article, and if you did, I would love to see your thoughts and opinions in the comment section below. It’s always the most ecstatic feeling in the world to provide value to people.
(I’m publishing this article as a part of the Digital Deepak Internship Program)
