Marketing Blind - How To Fail at Growing Your Business

Marketing Blind is an ideal way to fail at growing your business and throw your marketing budget down the drain.   

Many businesses consider marketing to be an additional task that they just don’t have time for. Cold calls and a couple of ads in a local newspaper or a trade magazine are easy to fit in but anything else can be considered to be a big hassle.

After all, if you use your expertise to provide great services and/or products - marketing isn’t really your job is it?  Actually, if you do not have someone to outsource your marketing to, it is your job!

Marketing isn’t just about paying for advertising, having a website or putting leaflets through thousands of letter boxes. A crucial and almost forgotten feature about marketing is having hard cold facts about where your business is now and a crystal clear vision of where you want to be in the future. Marketing then includes the process of transforming your business from where it is now to where you want it to be to achieve your business objectives.

Marketing Blind
I would guess that most of us would never consider driving to a complete unknown destination, if we had no previous knowledge about the route, without either researching the route beforehand or using a map to get from A to B.

If you go away on holiday, unless you have an impeccable memory, you will have your travel itinerary with you to make sure that you don’t miss the flight or go to the wrong hotel. So why would you treat the growth of your business in the same way as an unplanned journey?

A perfect way to ensure that you never increase your profits or get your business out of a rut is to undertake your ‘marketing blind’. That is to know nothing about the position of your business in the market that you operate in and to proceed to implement marketing strategies without any long or short term goals.

Free Marketing Audit - The Situational Analysis Tool
If you do not monitor all of your marketing activity i.e. make a list of the media tools used, the budget spent, the profile of your target market, the number/cost of leads, and number/cost of customers, and revenue generated you will never know if your activities have met any of your business goals.

The Guerrilla Marketing Manifesto ‘Situational Analysis Tool’ is available for download free of charge - http://www.entrepreneurmarketingblog.com/free-marketing-audit/. It will take you through the process of how to:

1. Review the market that you are operating in. Is it new, old, growing or in decline? Can you enter a new market or should you exit an existing one?
2. Conduct research and find out what your customers/clients think of your products and services.
3. Review the internal and external conditions that affect the successful growth of your business and its profitability.
4. Consider whether your products, services and marketing match the profile of your customers and clients. Are any changes needed?
5. Review the features and benefits of your products and services. Should you launch new products, develop existing ones or withdraw from the market?
6. Recognise the intrinsic link between pricing, value and perception with your position in the market.
7. Have a clear brand identity which is promoted through all of your marketing activities.
8. Know the strengths and weaknesses of your planned business growth activities i.e. understand where the opportunities are that can be exploited and the downfalls that should be avoided.

After a Marketing Audit - The Next Step in Marketing
So if you want your marketing to succeed and do not want to throw your budget down the drain, you cannot keep doing the same marketing activities regardless of whether they work or not. The definition of madness, or so they say, is to keep doing the same thing expecting a different result.

You must complete a marketing audit by reviewing everything that you are doing, analyse the results and set objectives and goals to be met in the future. All of this information can be fed into a long term marketing strategy where you set your business goals over a 3-5 year period. You can then develop a short term marketing plan to ensure that you keep on track with specific marketing tools to be implemented over a shorter period of time - typically a 12 month period.

Marketing is about having a vision that can be translated into action - ‘Marketing Blind’ is the antithesis this. You must only take action based on knowledge and information (your gut feeling won’t hurt either!). So, before you pick up the phone and take another call from a sales executive flogging advertising space or spend another penny on advertising that you have no idea will work, take stock of where you are now so that you can achieve your future goals

Guerrilla Marketing Philosophy

The main obstacles to successful marketing include a lack of commitment, a poor understanding of the benefits associated with what is being sold and poor brand positioning.

All entrepreneurs need to know why someone should buy from them and understand the benefits attached to what they are selling.  A business should also have an identity that is aligned with the prospect’s ideals to encourage a sale. 

Guerrilla Marketing Mindset

Guerrilla marketing philosophy emphasises the need to have a plan to get you from where you are now to where you want to be in the most efficient way.  Many of us have encountered a speculative sales call and bought advertising space that produced no results.  The aim is that you do not waste time by following the well worn path of many entrepreneurs i.e. pay for advertising without really having a strategy in mind. 

Guerrilla Marketing Manfesto System

I have created the Guerrilla Marketing Manifesto ‘Breakthrough Planning System’, to allow you to review your marketing, create an efficient guerrilla marketing plan and then implement it – it is all about taking action.  The guerrilla marketing plan model will give you the chance to hit the ground running and not waste money on aimless marketing activity. 
 
You will be able to create an individualised long term marketing strategy and short term marketing plan to suit your needs and budget.  As you well know, in a competitive environment, ‘business’ enemies are out there of all shapes and sizes trying to sell more, advertise more, and take a bigger share of the market.  You need to step up to the plate.

‘ . . .   the two most important things you should know if you‘re to succeed with guerrilla marketing:  (1) Start with a plan and (2) commit to that plan.  If you do those two things, you’re off to the right start, and you’re primed for success.’ by Jay Conrad Levinson