A guest blog by marketing consultant Sarah Orchard – Orchard Marketing Associates
Well that’s one way of looking at marketing. And, certainly for some small business owners, it’s easy to get sucked into believing that the more they market themselves the greater their financial success is likely to be. It’s true that regular marketing should get results, but it’s not necessarily about doing more.
Too much mud can cause problems!
Sometimes, the amount of marketing can actually have a negative impact, the complete opposite of what it’s meant to achieve. Persist with a poor marketing strategy and turn up the frequency and you may find your Twitter followers dwindling and that all important email database getting smaller and smaller as recipients unsubscribe.
If you keep sending out the same offer over and over again your audience will actually stop hearing or noticing you. You become wallpaper. And that’s why it’s so important to think about the messages you’re sending out. If it’s not sufficiently compelling to capture attention and motivate people to act on it, then shouting the same thing louder and louder is never going to work.
So how do you make the mud stick?
If your marketing is generating very low results, it’s time to ask yourself some questions:
- Are you addressing a genuine pain point for your customers?
- Are you satisfying customer needs or desires?
- Are you communicating with the right people?
- Is everyone being sent the same message without any differentiation?
- Is your special offer actually that special?
- Are you using the right communication channels for your audience?
Keep throwing mud aimlessly and all you will achieve is damage to your brand and reputation. So stop, ask yourself those key questions and refine your marketing activity accordingly. Then load yourself with some good quality marketing mud, choose your target, take careful aim and go for it!