Why You Should Stop Marketing, Now!

Small businesses, growing businesses, start-ups and entrepreneurs. Stop. NOW.
It may seem a bit negative (from a marketer) and possibly controversial to some, but hear me out;

You could well be wasting your time and money chasing customers who either don’t exist or aren’t interested.

There, I’ve said it.

But why so negative?

I’m not intentionally being negative – in-fact, my intentions are that of support, not suppression. You see, I spend a lot of my time speaking to businesses whose marketing isn’t working, or they don’t feel it’s heading in the ‘right direction’ (although many don’t know what that direction should be.) From my experience there’s various common threads no matter the organisation and industry. Here’s three to get you thinking;

  1. You’ve not defined who your ideal customer is.
    Yep. Sounds obvious, but have you really sat down and considered who is/should/could buy your products and services? What drives them? What influences them? Do you have a clue? Do you even speak with your customers to understand them?
  2. You’re not approaching your strategy holistically.
    Your marketing strategy should consider all aspects of customer touch-points and experience; an entire ecosystem if you wish. Yep, you may have figured out the Facebook algorithm, but that’s just one channel out of many ways your customer sees you.
  3. You give up after 1 failure.
    Of course, we all get disappointed with failure, but not having immediate success suggests you may need to take a step back and review what you’ve done, or perhaps take a long and short term approach as awareness can take time. The important thing is to review. Taking a scatter-gun approach is almost as bad as continually repeating the same mistake.

Do any of these sound familiar to you in any way? (Be honest..)

There are plenty of others, but I will leave those for when we have a chat if you’d like?

In the meantime, please STOP MARKETING – unless you’re prepared to do it properly that is.

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