With tons of marketing resources and tools literally at your fingertips, it can be tempting to launch as many as possible into the crowd in the hopes that something will stick. A word of advice: Don’t. Not only are the chances of something sticking very slim, but all that frenzied activity scatters your energy across too many fronts. In fact, the tactic can actually end up making things worse.
How It Can Make Things Worse
Diving headfirst into each shiny new marketing tool that comes along can be a colossal waste of time and money, perhaps even result in a marketing budget cuts when the boss sees the tactics aren’t working to achieve the business objectives.
And that’s where the first problem lies with scattered, more-is-better marketing tactics. They plunge into a solution before they even know the objective, or the problem they’re trying to solve.
Let’s say marketing team members did try the see-what-sticks tactic, establishing accounts on every social media platform they could find. The “likes” were going through the roof, website traffic hit astronomical proportions and the team started capturing visitor info to purse as leads.
The company even had to hire on new members to handle the influx of leads – but not a single lead panned out. No one bought a thing. The company objective had been to increase profits, but the marketing free-for-all did just the opposite. Sure, the tactic piqued plenty of curiosity, just not from the folks who would actually buy the company’s product.
How to Make It Better
Your first marketing goal is to determine what, exactly, you’re trying to achieve. Once you’ve established the big-picture objective, then you can choose the marketing tools, resources and strategies that support it. Be specific and discreet about your goals. If you averaged 75 leads on 5,000 visits a month and generated $300,000 revenue from sales on those closed leads, decide what your increase will be this year - 5%, 10%? Do you have a new line of business you will be promoting? What are the marketing goals for this new line of business?
Related: 5 Golden Rules for Successful Inbound Marketing
Instead of going crazy trying to get as many leads as possible, a wiser move would be to invest the time, effort and resources to generate solid leads. A power tool company targeting men, for instance, may do better to invest their marketing dollars on a series of helpful YouTube how-to videos rather than post high-end photos of a drill on Instagram or Pinterest.
A few tips can also help guide you on your marketing way:
- Understand the question before launching a solution.
- Don’t try to divide and conquer the world – focus and conquer a small part of it.
- Instead of trying to be everything to everybody, go for being the most you can be to those who matter most.
- A big, fat to-do list isn’t the same as an effective marketing plan.
When it comes to effective marketing, focus is the name of the game. And it’s tough, if not impossible, to focus when efforts are scattered in every possible direction. Marketing is much more than a series of activities. It’s a well thought-out discipline enhanced by choices and tactics that support your company’s overall aim. And you don’t need every single marketing tool out there to do it.
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