10 Signs Your Marketing Strategy Badly Needs a Change

Let’s suppose you have the best product in the market and you are happily promoting it over the Internet, using social media, via some traditional marketing means and so on and so forth. But, you aren’t keeping a close eye on what you competitors and doing and updates in your target market. Short sighted marketing goals reap shop term results and leave you stranded and stupefied in the long run.

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

Work on your short term goals keeping long term goals in mind. In case you find yourself incompetent to do so, learn how to do marketing your brand. Find loopholes in your marketing strategy and fix them ASAP. If you need to upgrade your skills, do it now before you vanish from the industry.

There are several negative effects of outsourcing like decreased quality, loss of jobs from the hiring company, poorer customer service and hidden costs. Other effects are unreliable vendors and loss of control due to the long-term effects on the business.Moreover, outsourcing does not always yield positive results and in case you do not know what went wrong, you can’t blame the outsourcing company.

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

In case you are outsourcing a part or your entire marketing, prepare a chart of expenses you had to incur on outsourcing in the past 1 year. Now, just think, if you knew how to DIY you could have invested this money in something more productive. Also, if you learn how to promote your business on various marketing platforms, you would be able to plan, conceptualize and implement your marketing strategy yourself. C’mon…it’s your company after all!

It’s a competitive world out there! Moreover, we homo-sapiens reside in an ever changing environment. Probably, you are still struck with the old school marketing techniques while the rest of the world is going digital. Maybe your competitors are using different techniques for advertising and covering a wide geographical area to reach out to their target audience.

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

Improvise your current marketing strategy and blend it with internet marketing which offers a much wider targeting, cost-effectiveness and likewise. Internet marketing is the latest trend in the industry considering the fact that India alone has 151,598,994 internet users! Now stop counting the figure! Get on your heels and upgrade your skills to succeed in this competition.

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You have to pay for ads in newspapers or mailers every time you run a new campaign. Traditional marketing companies may charge per delivery area for fliers or mailers. You find that a major portion of your budget is spent on marketing activities and ROI is low.

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

Try promoting your marketing on the Internet. Adding new products or sales pages to your website doesn’t create additional costs if you already have a person on your team who can update your product information. On the Internet; your ad is accessible to the entire World Wide Web. It’s cost effective and yields high ROI.

Traditional Marketing is fine when it comes to targeting a niche. But, if you want to expand your business to a wider geographical area, I am sorry to sat but, conventional marketing won’t do the trick! Even though old school marketing has its own benefits but with online presence, your marketing efforts are like a ship without a sail.

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

Keep you marketing activities in place and blend them with digital marketing techniques. Doing this you will notice several benefits like increase in your brand value, wider targeting, cost-effectiveness, high ROI, etc…In this digitized world, if your brand does not have an online presence, you probably are losing a lot of potential customers.

Most probably, you are using old print media or likewise to market your product and you are unable to measure the performance of your campaigns. You are clueless which campaign is giving you less returns and what you should do to supplement that particular campaign. Moreover, are you solely relying on old school advertising!?C’mon, be practical! Take your example – How many times have you stopped by a salesman distributing pamphlets and actually took that and read it? Well, you can answer that better, I suppose…

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

The bitter truth is that you cannot measure your marketing performance with old print media. To measure your performance and take corrective actions, you have to learn to use tools like Google Analytics which can accurately measure the performance of an online marketing campaign. Not only this, you can also track which people saw your ad and actually read it! Isn’t the Internet a beauty!?

Emotional Marketing or Emotional Branding is quite new a concept in the industry. People love when you address them by names, they love when you don’t try to sell via cold calling platforms but instead, simply understand their needs and advise accordingly. If you are still using a generic medium for advertising, it’s quite obvious your marketing strategy lacks a major chunk! Moreover, people hearing about your product say – “Are you a brand?”

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

Try email marketing! It’s simple to understand, cost effective and can cater you your personalization needs. Moreover, it can help build a strong customer base as people love reading stuff which is personalized for especially for them. In the end – “CUSTOMER IS THE KING”

Social media includes Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, etc. To support the above statement, I will pick up Facebook as an example. The total number of Facebook subscribers in the world is estimated to be 937,407,180 and counting! If your brand isn’t on FB or any other social media platform, you are making a big mistake and losing on a lot of potential leads.

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

Start marketing your product/service on social media platforms. Learn it if you don’t know how to do it. In this digitized world, social media presence is imperative for your business as it increases awareness and adds to your brand value.

Let’s suppose you have the best products and services in the world but if no one knows about it, what’s the use? A better proposal would be to open a small shop in a particular resentment, sit back, relax, enjoy TV and cater to everyday local customers! If you plan to grow your business, an online presence is a must. But, here’s the catch! Even if you have an online presence, that won’t suffice, your website should show among the top searches in search engines so that when people search for a particular keyword related to your product/service, your website is visible to them on the 1st page of the search results. Studies prove that more than 84% of the people never go to the second page when they are searching for something on search engines.

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

In case you do not have a website, get one built ASAP. If you have one already, learn Search Engine Optimization, which is one of components of digital marketing. By doing so, you will be able to improve your website’s ranking so that it comes in top searches of the search engine.

Word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM, WOM marketing), also called word of mouth advertising, is an unpaid form of promotion—oral or written—in which satisfied customers tell other people how much they like a business, product, service, or event. It is one of the most credible forms of advertising as this is one form of marketing in which you don’t have to work a lot. You just have to promote your business and provide good services.

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

If you haven’t been told by anyone that they love your marketing, take it as a major flaw in your marketing strategy and work towards it. Grow your business and learn to promote it online. Learn about different techniques that will make you a master of marketing any business online. It not only increses your brand value but the benefits go far beyond that.