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.