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

Target Audience Definition

Many businesses find it quite difficult to clearly state who their customers (current and potential) are and use a very loose description.  Why does it matter?  Because knowing who they are, what they like along with their needs and desires will feed into what you sell and how you sell it.

Magazines in particular are very good at defining who their readers are so that potential advertisers have a clear idea who reads the magazine.  Marie Claire magazine (http://www.marieclaire.co.uk) gives an overview of its readers on its rate card aimed at advertisers.      Have a look for yourself - http://www.ipcadvertising.com/resource/rz4ksj85kcxcpyz0p2rjo8li.pdf

-  68% ABC1 (this is the socio economic group)
-  Median age – 33
-  Appearance conscious
-  Spend a lot of money oh clothes, toiletries and cosmetics
-  Cannot resist expensive perfume/aftershave

Action Points

For your business, find out more about your customers/clients so that you can make sure that your products and services meet their needs and that your marketing is appropriate for that group. 

1.  For example, send a questionnaire to your customers/clients and find out more about them – how old are they, their age, gender, where they live etc.  Define who your customers are in general and/or for specific products, services or ranges. 

2.  Create a profile or a pen portrait describing who they are, their lifestyles, their social groupings, where they live, what they want out of life and the challenges that they face.

3.  For business clients, include additional factors such as sector, location, turnover, job title/function, number of employees etc

4.  Review your products and services - are they aligned with your actual and potential customers?  Make changes where necessary i.e. target your existing products/services to a new target audience or create new products/services for your existing target audience.   

5.  Examine the marketing and advertising activity that you currently use.  Do the media tools used for your advertising and marketing fit with the customer profile that you have created?  If not, research alternative media that is more suitable.