Three Mistakes That Can Kill Marketing
Marketing needs to be a considered effort and that effort needs to start well before a marketing plan is written or a marketing campaign is launched. If the preparation is faulty, the marketing effort is doomed and you’ll experience a wasted campaign and potentially damage future efforts. Avoid these mistakes as you prepare to market.
Failing to present your value proposition. You need to help the potential customer clearly understand what the value of your product or service is to them. Don’t talk about how great it is, how much better it is than your competitors’, etc. At least, don’t talk about other aspects of your offering until the customer understands what’s in it for them.
Failing to identify the customer segments for which your offering is designed. Know your customers. Who are they? What are their demographics and buying habits? What channels do they purchase through? If you don’t know your customer segment well, it’s hard to craft a campaign that reaches them
Talking about you instead of them. Your customers want to learn about you and how solid and trustworthy you are, but not until they have decided that they are interested in your offering. If they can’t quickly ascertain the value to them, they’ll lose interest and you’ll lose a customer.
A business model and marketing plan will help you clarify your goals, offering, value, and customer segments and aid you in crafting successful marketing campaigns. Think like your customers and test your campaigns and products on them prior to launching and you’ll be much more successful.
How can you easily avoid this? A well-developed business model is the crux of your business success. You need many other things to succeed such as skillful operations, marketing, sales, etc. but without a solid business model failure will be on the horizon. A well-developed business model is only half complete until it is validated.
Why validate a business model? A business model is essentially how your business delivers value to your customers. If it is only based on assumptions (like many strategic plans), you are launching your execution based upon a hypothesis. You’ll prove or disprove it this way, but it will be quite expensive. Rather, validate the model prior to planning how to execute it and launching.
How do you validate your model? First, list all of the assumptions you’ve made to create the model and then consider the “pass/fail” metrics for each assumption. In other words, what must be true for the assumption to be valid? You can use four basic criteria to test your assumptions: will customers buy it and at what price, can you deliver it to the customer within that cost structure, can you supply enough to satisfy demand, and how easy will it be for a competitor to copy your model?
Build your tests to the level of detail necessary and execute the tests quickly. Adjust your model until you have it right. Now, when you launch, you’ll have much more predictable results and should avoid dramatic and costly failures.