3. Three Marketing Misconceptions
The Brand Therapist Now In Session Discussing:
Three Marketing Misconceptions
Over the past 15 years, I've worked in marketing across multiple industries and these three misconceptions continue to pop up on a fairly regular basis with my clients. So I'm going to take this time to break these down and hopefully give you guys some insight and clarity for your marketing strategies. So number one, the marketing magic pill or one size fits all. So let's just start off by, there is none. This is not a thing.
If you're a business owner, you probably get bombarded with marketing opportunities on a daily basis that promise lead generation or whatever the product is that it's going to solve all your marketing problems. Trust me, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Marketing should be dynamic and custom for your brand. If you've created a brand that you think is unique and provides value to your clients in a way that other businesses can't, you've got to ask yourself why one of these one size fits all options would work for your brand. If your brand is so different and unique.
Your brand is not a cookie cutter brand and it doesn't fit into a box, so neither should your marketing. With that being said, there are a lot of these programs out there that may work for your business. And a lot of them offer key components of your marketing that everybody needs to have, such as social media or the lead generation. So I'm not saying they're all bad and that none of them work, but you really need to take the time to see what fits your brand. And chances are these types of programs, your money can be better spent elsewhere and still get you a better ROI.
Worth The Effort
Okay. So misconception number two is results will be immediate. We all want to see immediate results in a marketing, especially if it's high ticket items and things that we're putting money into, but we need to be patient and really look through what that plan is and make sure that we give it time to be successful. I like to look at the marketing plan, kind of like a fitness plan as an analogy. When you launch a campaign that first day, it's like going to the gym for the first time in awhile, it feels super productive, but you're not going to see the results.
When you get home with a fitness plan. If you're only going a couple of times a week to the gym, you'll see those results, but they're going to take some time to see them. If you do things like increase your frequency, focus on workouts, your nutrition, this is going to help you achieve those results faster. And with the workouts, if you're really customizing your workout to the areas you want to see the most results in, that's going to help you get there faster. So when you're working on your fitness plan, we know those, the results are not immediate. So what do we do to stay motivated? Usually we track the progress, right? So we might track our weight loss, our body index, the inches we've lost, whatever that looks like, depending on the goals that you're trying to achieve. So if we take this back over to our marketing plans, we can look at it in a very similar light.
You know, if you launch that campaign at the beginning, it's going to eventually yield results, but things that are going to help those results be better and faster, it's going to be that comprehensive plan around it. You're going to have multiple different pieces of the puzzle targeted at your specific goals. And then again, we're going to track that we don't expect it to happen in a day, but we're going to track our success and pay attention to what's working and what's not. So we can make those adjustments and hit the target that we're looking for. So when it comes to your marketing, instead of looking at your end goal and expecting to achieve that quickly, instead, let's break that down and track and pay attention to indicators along the way that shows us what's working, what's not, so we can adjust it to hit our goals.
Create A Winning Strategy
So the last one, which is one of the biggest ones I see across industries is: my assistant can do my marketing. For me, marketing is a skill and a specialty. That's not to say that you may not have a fantastic assistant. Who's willing to jump in and do it, but that's not why you hired that person. That's not the best value. I commonly come across clients who have their assistants, handling all of their marketing for them, and don't understand why their marketing's not working. Chances are you did not hire your assistant to do your marketing. They probably don't have a marketing background and is not their best value. They're probably really good at what you actually hired them to do.
I also see people in the same capacity if they don't have an assistant, maybe they have a web designer who did a great job on their website. So now they're hiring them to run their social or the graphic designer who they're trying to get to do the copyright for the ad. These positions are very unique within the marketing field. You have your web designers, graphic design, photographers, social media specialists, copywriters. There's so many different people that fall into this category, and they're all super important and essential to the overall marketing success of your business. But just because they're really well qualified in one of these areas does not mean they're qualified to handle the others.
I really like to compare this to football. And since it's football season, it's a good analogy. If you think about the different positions on a football team, you have your quarterback, your linebackers, wide receivers, your defense, a kicker, all the different positions, they're all highly skilled and trained in that one position. That's just like your graphic designers, photographers, even salespeople, things like that in the marketing realm, they're very, well-trained in their position and they all work together as a team, by being the best in their specific role. Your head coach would be your marketing director. They call the shots, they analyze the data, they shift on the go and they create strategies for success. Now the head coach has other coaches that work with them. And so in a bigger company with the full marketing department, you might see these people as your art director or sales managers.
Now if the football team made the same mistakes that a lot of small businesses make and a lot of my clients make, you would see someone like the quarterback trying to play the other positions. It doesn't work. They are the quarterback. That is their job. That's what they know. And that's what they do. Well kind of on the same lines, if you have a great marketing director, but you're not letting them hire the team that they need. It's like having the best coach in the league, actually playing the game. It's not going to work. I hope this gives you a little better understanding of marketing and some of the misconceptions that you can easily avoid. If you can take a few things away from this, remember that if it seems too good to be true, it probably is. Rome wasn't built in a day. And make sure that you are hiring the right people in the right positions for your team.
Listen to the audio at https://www.thebrandtherapist.co/podcast-1/episode/ea4b1870/2-how-to-be-your-own-brand
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