TOCICO

5 Major Marketing Mistakes: Marketing is connecting with your target market and showing them you have the stuff that solves their problem or delivers better outcomes / results, explaining it to them where they can be found and helping them to buy it. Here are 5 major marketing mistakes: 1. Not selecting a target market or niche. Your target market is the people you want to sell to along with the products/ services you sell. People with specific needs and the specific stuff they need equal a target market. Undesirable effects (UDEs) will only make sense to your market IF they are really THEIR UDEs. The TOC buy-In process is missing layer 0. It’s very difficult to gain buy-in from an unknown, un-described, entity. If your target market is not specific enough, they won’t relate. The more specific and targeted your market, the more you can talk directly to them and in their language. Where do you make the most throughput for the least amount of your capacity? What are your under exploited assets? Opportunity is … a need to be fulfilled … a want to be addressed … a fear to be relieved … a problem that needs to be solved. For opportunity to flourish there needs to be an identifiable group that will buy it and a profitable way to contact and engage the target market. When most hunters go out to hunt, they think like hunters. When a master goes out to hunt, he thinks like a deer. Knowing what your market really wants and who they really are is very important. Communicating where they’re at without making them wrong is important, while pushing their emotional hot buttons. Rationality is used as a tool to support the emotional. Write your marketing to ONE very specific person (your Avatar – a member of your target market). Market WHERE they hang out and in the way (type of media) they hang out. 2. Not measuring at all or not measuring the right things. In operations we can physically see constraints. In marketing we don’t have this ability – we need data. What’s working for you – twitter, LinkedIn, website, webinars, direct mail, Facebook, Interest, article writing, PPC, retargeting, blog posts, TV, banner ads, podcasts, cold calls, video marketing, leaving comments, mobile marketing, e-mail marketing, or what? How many leads do you generate? By what method(s)? What is your conversion rate at each step of your sales inversion process? What’s your sales conversion process? Retention process? What’s your upsell and/or post sale process? What do you spend on marketing and what ROI does each generate? (BTW your ROIs will be much better if you have a specific target market.) When calculating your ROI, consider both time and money. If you don’t know these numbers, how will you know where to focus your efforts and what to improve? Testing is how we improve our marketing. What to test, in what order depends on what your measures are indicating. Test your message - wording, pictures, colors, placement, fonts. Test the medium - direct mail, ads, videos, webinars, closing techniques. Test your sales process. Test where/ how your make your offers, as well as, the specifics of your offer. The ability to turn floods of information into real knowledge has become one of today’s most valuable resources. 3. Not understanding what you’re selling. It’s not about you or your product / service. It’s about them and the outcome or better results they’re seeking. The customer doesn’t want products, services or techniques – they want an outcome! People want value. The way we offer them value is in the form of results which is in the form of our products or services. Selling tangible, measurable results that the customer can expect to experience in the real world dramatically increases the price you can charge. We want high value products/ services that are tailored to our customers needs so that they say to themselves – I never knew someone could understand this at this level. If you don’t understand your target market (1) nor what you’re selling, then you have no chance of knowing what competitive advantage to create or what mafia offer to make. 4. Doing nothing to generate leads. Thinking that hope and a website are a strategy. The more you can spend to get a lead, the less you have to worry about competition. There are lots of ways to generate leads. Which is best depends on your situation. That’s why testing is so important. You can start by seeing what competitors are doing. If they are using a particular lead generation method for more than 4 months, they are probably getting an ROI from it. Draw your funnel and track the data. There are 3 ways to GROW a business. 1) increase the number of customers; 2) increase the T per transaction; and 3) increase the frequency of purchase or repurchase. 5. Push marketing instead of pull marketing. Leverage applies in marketing just as it applies in operations. It costs you the same to send out a flier that gets a 1% response rate or a 10% response rate. By working on the right things in your marketing you greatly increase your leverage. Getting prospects to seek YOU out and/or realize 'I need help' is pull marketing. Spewing everything you know out to your market is about you, not your customer. Your marketing should itself be valuable. Give away some of your best stuff. Get people to act NOW. Give your prospects results in advance. Call out the elephant in the room. Repurpose content. Inherent simplicity applies in marketing too. People want simple ideas, not complex ones. Influential writing is not about writing better, it’s about simplifying things in a better way. Without a detailed avatar of who you are marketing/ writing to/ for, and what makes them tick, you are engaging in blind target shooting.