There is no such thing as a point in which you can say: “I’m satisfied with the state my business is in, I don’t need to change anything”. Sure, your company might be making good profit, have a stable financial flow and everything might be going smoothly, but things change fast. The business world is an unstable environment and things have a tendency to change. The companies that survive are the ones that pay attention to details and the importance of changes and adjustments. There truly isn’t another way.
A lot of business owners that started out strong have gone under specifically because they have failed to identify the right moment to shake things up a bit. The thing is – people change, times change and these last 70 years have been very eventful in all fields. You can’t keep doing what you did 10 years ago and expect to have the same level of success. Things tend to become obsolete really fast.
When we look at the marketing world, we see some significant changes but we are still in the transitional period. In the previous era of marketing, there was a general opinion that the more material you put out there, the more attention you will attract and this worked for a while. People even used commercials to grade the quality of the product based on the quality of their commercials and the frequency of their airing on popular media. After a while though, they started to resent this kind of approach since things got a bit out of hand and companies started shoving ads down their throats. This pushiness, along with the influence of online marketing as a new option, changed the marketing game permanently.
The audience has started asking for something in return for enduring your intrusion in to their attention span. They have also developed a kind of a mental filter which just goes: ”Oh, commercials? I don’t need to pay attention to this”, and just switch off. You need to make the right moves and really capture their attention, make them truly interested. In order to achieve this, the first thing you should do is conduct market research.
Market research can be helpful with a lot of things, like changing your work ethic, identifying and tightening some loose screws, improving your customer relations and of course, raising the quality of your marketing moves. When you need answers about the market, there is no better place to go to than the source itself – the customers. They are the ones who actually dictate the way things should be done, but they can’t really tell you which moves you should make. This is the job of your market research team. To gather info and decipher it into valid information you can use as a basis for your decision making.
There are companies that have a tendency to copy the moves of the competition in order to achieve better results. This is something I would advise against, since not every situation is the same even if you are in the same branch. Things that work for them won’t necessarily work for you.
The right place to invest when it comes to marketing is its quality. The time in which you practically “spam” your 200$ commercial wherever you have a chance has passed and will get you nothing. You need to put out quality content which will make customers truly interested so that they would want to show it to their friends. Another option is to actually give away marketing products that are truly useful to your customers. The things that make a truly useful marketing product vary from niche to niche and you should find the thing that works for you.
When you have the right basis for all the things that you do, you will be able to lower the quantity and the level of marketing presence, thus saving money. Airing times cost far more than the creation of an actual commercial. Also, by doing consistent work, you will facilitate the process of branding, which is always a long term goal of any smart company.
It’s time to rethink – how do you do things? Really try to figure this out – are you getting the return on investment from your marketing efforts? Good luck.
