Marketing Trap #26 - Trying To Do Too LIttle

From "99 Marketing Traps and How to Avoid Them ..."

Some marketers do enough to “say” they are marketing but in fact are doing next to nothing.

“Oh yeah, we do that.”

Marketing, for these folks, is a check list item … not the engine for sustained business growth.

They probably have a Web site (that no one in the company has visited in more than a month). They probably have an ad (or at least a listing) in the Yellow Pages with no other presence on an ongoing basis.

Occasionally they might get a mention in a local newspaper article that lets them put a check in the “PR done” column (without ever reprinting the article and merchandising the publicity for buyers and prospects).

Maybe they ran a limited flight of radio spots once and saw no corresponding bump in traffic and sales (because – obviously – advertising just doesn’t work for their kind of business).

But they believe in marketing. They believe in getting it done and out of the way.

They believe in not letting marketing get in the way of building their business. (They probably also treat their buyers as transactions rather than as the best marketing asset they could ever have.)

If You Know Anyone Who's Fallen into this Trap, How Do They Get Out?

The trap here is in believing that your marketing work is ever really done (unless, of course, you have closed the doors for good).

Marketing is not something you get done. It’s something you get to do every day with every prospect and buyer. Otherwise, you’re almost certainly not doing enough to see any real impact on business growth.

Doing too little marketing is actually worse than doing nothing. You’re just spending more for the same result.

You should have a marketing check list to make sure that everything you planned gets done as planned. But a marketing check list without a marketing plan is like a catchy advertising jingle that … ooops! … fails to mention the brand: sounds good, sells nothing.

Marketing Trap #20 - Vacuum Marketing

From 99 Marketing Traps and How to Avoid Them

It’s amazing how many companies operate as if they were marketing in a vacuum. They won’t admit it, even to themselves. They know they have real competitors. They know they need to know their buyers thoroughly, even intimately. They know all that. But their actions speak otherwise.

They live on short-cuts and hunches. They act as if yesterday’s results remain the best guide for tomorrow’s strategies.

They focus more on what is on their desks than on what buyers are really saying and thinking (online and in person). They assign pigeon holes to their competition and draw invincibility from their assumptions.

They revel in what they have determined are the critical differences between themselves and their competitors, and they confidently assume that those differences really matter to buyers. (Ironically, most of their competitors believe that they have the same differences.)

What’s driving this vacuum? Is it ignorance or arrogance? Doesn’t matter. Both are deadly to growth. Nothing that lives can survive in a vacuum.

How to Avoid this Trap:

The problem with this trap (as with so many of these marketing traps) is that the victims don’t know they are in it. Ignorance can be comforting, even if it comes at the price of business slipping away.

Wake up! The more you actually interact with buyers, the harder it will be to operate with a vacuum mindset. The more that practice becomes a habit throughout your organization, the more you will be swept out of the vacuum and into a state of sustainable momentum and profitable growth.