5 Marketing Tips to Dominate in 2019 – Market Your Business Better
In this video, we’re going to cover the five reasons your marketing sucks and how to fix it. The first mistake most companies make is they are not doing anything. This is not the past where advertising and marketing was unknown, it was extremely difficult, you couldn’t do anything on your own, and nobody really knew what was going on. Marketing in this day and age is extremely easy, especially when you look at campaigns and social and all this organic stuff you can do.
You don’t have to have an agency per se. You could do it internally yourselves, even if you have somebody that knows graphic design. There’s a lot of things that you can do, but the mistake that companies make is they’re just like throwing their hands up, saying, “I’m not going to do any marketing. It’s too fluffy.” We did a video on sales versus marketing.
Sales people typically look at it and say, “That’s a waste of money to put into marketing,” but the companies that aren’t doing anything, if you haven’t tried or if you tried in the past, and you said, “I’m going to try this. I’m going to do this advertising,” or, “I’m going to do this campaign,” and it didn’t work, then you just pull out and say, “All right. This isn’t a good fit for our business.” You can’t just sit there and not do anything. You have to put some sort of effort forth. Obviously, you have to have a strategy. Number one, you have to be doing some sort of marketing. If you’re doing nothing, then you’re not going to be building that brand awareness, and you’re relying solely on either your historic brand awareness that you had or you’re a newer company or don’t have that brand awareness, you’re solely relying on the sales people to push your brand out there, which that’s an extremely ineffective tactic because you’re working with a group of people whereas, from a marketing standpoint, you can put automation in place and a lot of programs and distribution channels and things like that take over.
Obviously, if you’re not doing anything, then that’s a pretty big mistake. Do something. Look into the strategy. Look at other videos we’ve produced with where to start, but you have to do something. The second mistake companies make is their budget is too small. Most of the time, when people set budgets, they are unrealistic. Usually the reason why they’re unrealistic is because they just don’t know what the cost is. Since you don’t know what the cost is, maybe you’ve gone out and gotten quotes and things like that from companies and said, “Hey, this is roughly what it’s going to cost, in this range.” You’ve set your budget and say, “All right. Next year, this is what I want to spend on advertising, on marketing, on brand awareness, on digital, and all that stuff.” Most of the time, that budget isn’t accurate unless you choose one of those companies that you quoted with that say, “Based on where you’re at and where you want to go, this is what you need to happen,” and they build out that marketing strategy.
They say, “Boom, here’s the cost for that.” If you set your budget to that, you’re okay, but most of the time, people don’t do that. Budgeting is an afterthought from a marketing standpoint. They just haven’t allocated enough financial resources to be able to accomplish what they think they should do. From a general budgeting standpoint, you can say, “I only want to spend 20 grand this year on marketing,” and you can only spend 20 grand, but your expectations of what that 20 grand is going to produce better be in alignment with what that value is and what you can actually do with that amount of money.
We did a whole video on budgeting and the issues with budgeting. We’ll link it up here. That dives deep into the issues around and how people think you can get more, their expectations are too high for what they’re trying to spend, and your budget is busted from the get-go or you say, “I have no budget.” From a general standpoint, you should budget something. If you’re a larger corporation, I’m not going to throw a percentage out there like some people do and say it should be 1% of net revenue, 1.5% or .5% of your total revenue. You need to budget something, but make it realistic to what you are actually going to do in that next year. Calendar Q4, Q3 or Q4 of that year, start planning for the next year. Engage with agencies. Engage with whatever it is that you need to do. If you’re doing a new website, if you want an agency to come on like ours and do all of your digital marketing for you, engage them upfront before you set your budget, before you go to your bosses and say, “This is how much I want to spend next year.” Get those numbers.
Get them to be accurate and plan out that strategy because if you go into it and you say either, one, have no budget, or, “Here’s the little bit that I can do,” sometimes it’s not even worth it to do that little bit unless you’re going to do the full suite of things. Not having a budget, that is a huge mistake that people make. The third mistake companies make are they are focused in the wrong areas. Where are you focusing your marketing? Where is the attention of whoever you’re trying to get as a customer or get into your brand awareness and learn about what you’re doing, your product, your service? Where is that attention? Most companies are usually focusing on the wrong areas.
Some of that depends on their department and who’s leading that department and what experience they have, the agency, if they’re using the agency. What is their expertise? What are they good at? If you’re focusing on the wrong areas, it doesn’t matter how much money you throw at it, you’re not going to get the return that you’re looking for. From a traditional standpoint, people are focusing on things like trade shows and print and brochures and ads in magazines and things like that. That may work to a certain percentage, but for the most part, you can get way more of a return on your investment and bang for your buck if you go onto the digital side because that’s where all the traction and attention is moving, is people are less focused on the traditional ways and more available to get their attention when it comes to a digital standpoint. If you’re focused in the wrong areas, you can throw all your money at it, it’s not going to do anything. Switching it over to a digital standpoint and focusing on things like organic SEO, organic social media, paid social media, PPC campaigns, whether it’s with Google or YouTube pre roll or whatever it is, looking at it from a digital standpoint, to be able to track that activity back to wherever you want it to go, typically, your website, landing page, whatever it is, track the engagement, look at the timeline sight, re-target those people, do all those things that we talk about in our videos.
If you’re focusing on the wrong areas, then you’re never going to get there. You’re just going to be throwing dollars at the wall, and you may as well just be burning them. Usually a company’s older generations are used to doing it a certain way or somebody that has experience in doing heavy into print, and if they’re in charge of your marketing, they’re going to want to go the print way.
If you bring in somebody that’s doing things differently, it may stir up that bee’s nest a little bit too much, and people get uncomfortable. They say, “You know what? I don’t want to do this because I don’t know anything about that, so I’m just going to stick down this path of what I do know. It’s working okay. It’s not as effective as it used to be.” You have to change that mindset. It’s not something that’s going to happen overnight unless you make major employee changes, cut the people out that aren’t pushing things forward, bringing either new people or bringing in an agency that’s going to take you from the traditional, let’s say the stone age era of just doing print and focusing more on digital standpoint.
They’re going to bring that newer age and new technology and capabilities into your company and say, “This is how we’re going to focus on this growth.” Stop looking at the traditional way. Start focusing on the ways that are working and wherever the attention of your target demographic is, that’s where you want to be pushing your marketing out from. The fourth mistake companies make is there is no distribution. All right. You’ve made this content, whether it’s an article, video. You’ve got branded graphics.
You’ve got print collateral, whatever it is that you have. You have some piece of marketing material now, but you’re not distributing it. Does not matter if you say, “I’m going to put this on my website. I’m going to put it onto the homepage of my website.” You’re only going to get eyes on that traffic of anybody that goes to it, and then you’re kind of flipping the coin to say whether or not they’re going to click it or read it. If you have a newsletter list, and let’s say you send it out to that, that’s just one aspect of distribution. Companies are making the mistake of creating content, and every company that I talk to, when we look at it from them bringing us in as an agency to assist them with their digital, they talk about, “All right. We just want you to make content for us.” I say, “Who’s going to distribute it? Because if we can make content for you, and you put it up on your website, you’re only getting a small percentage of traffic that’s going to actually look at it.
You have to have some distribution method.” Look at things like email marketing, although it’s not as effective as it used to be. It is still an effective, to a certain extent, play. Look at social organic, social advertising, doing things for SEO to drive new traffic in, doing PPC campaigns around whatever marketing piece you’re doing, but you have to have a distribution of that content thought about first before you create it because your creative is going to be affected based on how you want this to be distributed. Things that you push out on social, you’re going to have different creative than things you’re going to put on your site than things that you’re going to do through email marketing. Everything has to match the distribution source. You could get away with creating one piece of content and distributing it through two of the four channels, but most likely the piece of content you’re going to create, the piece of marketing collateral you’re going to create, you can not just say, “Here it is.
Send it out through everything,” because it’s going to be less effective. If you don’t have a distribution source, it’s not a waste of time because you’re at least creating content, but it’s going to be way less effective if you just say, “I got it. Throw it up on this one location. We’ll just wait for people to come and see it.” You have to go on an ongoing standpoint and push that out hard to bring new people into the funnel.
The fifth mistake companies make is there’s no consistency. All right. Everybody talks about creating content. We talk about it a ton. We’ve got videos linked above about content creation, how to do it, what you should be doing, how to distribute it. We just covered that in the last point, but it all comes down to consistency. Consistency is everything. If you look at every single algorithm out there, Google, YouTube, social, they’re always looking for people that are consistently posting things because they know that there’s going to be a higher likelihood of engagement.
You have to be consistent. You can start small and say, “I’m going to do one piece of content a week,” or, “I’m going to do one piece of content a month,” or you’re going to do it quarterly. Just start doing something consistently and then ramp it up from there because as soon as you start showing consistency, you’re going to get that dopamine drip of people liking and engaging, and you’re going to say, “I want to create more and more and more.” That will give you the motivation to put the financial resources or personnel resources behind it and the time allocated to do it on a daily, weekly basis or multiple times a week. Without that consistency, if you’re just doing it sporadically, you’re not going to have enough people that are waiting for that piece of content.
If you’re producing a weekly or a monthly piece of content, eventually, people, after they’ve seen it over an extended period of time, maybe it takes six months or a year, they’re going to be like, “I’m waiting for my monthly newsletter from ABC company.” They’re going to be expecting it, and they’re going to be wanting it. Then, when you don’t give it to them, there are some people, if they follow very closely, will reach out and be like, “Hey, where’s your content?” If you’re doing it daily, it’s going to be even more so. You’re going to speed that up even further to where it’s maybe in the first 30 days, by the end of that 30 days, you’ve got people that are expecting you to post a video or an article. Once they expect it, it’s going to be a lot more engagement and bringing them into your brand awareness funnel and really looking at the rest of the things that you do as a company. You have to show consistency. Do not do this sporadically. Don’t just create something and then forget about it. Don’t go crazy and do three months of creating it and then fall off the face of the earth.
Whenever you do that, you’re basically starting over from scratch. It’s just like sales. When you’re pushing hard to fill up your sales funnel, and you’re like, “I’m good. I’m not going to pull anybody else into this sales funnel. I’m going to work these deals I’ve got,” as soon as those deals dry up and you say, “Oh, shit. I don’t have any more deals. I need to go get some,” it’s not like you can just go get some and bring them right in, typically.
It’s going to take a little bit of time to get that funnel pumping again, a couple months, maybe six months, and then you get things flowing. Then, you’re going to stop again. Same thing with content and the same thing with marketing. You have to be consistent. You have to keep pushing along. Like I said, start small, get more repetitive from there, and shorten the timeframe in between marketing pieces, but you have to be consistent. Those are the five reasons why your marketing isn’t working and how to fix them. If you guys are doing any of those five things or if you like that content, hit that like button. If you’ve got questions about anything we’ve covered, leave them in the comments below, and we will see you on the next one. .
If you’re trying to #market your business, you might be doing a few things wrong. We go over the top 5 biggest reasons your #marketing isn’t as effective as it could be, and what you can do to make it better.
My video on marketing with a small budget: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEFHCp8i0Uo
My videos on content creation:
Part 1 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUShzf0ugtM
Part 2 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjYjJ3I4OMI
#marketingtips #doesyourmarketingsuck #marketbetter
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