Marketing is a fine, nay, critical piece of growing your company. But, if you are down in the dumps, if your business is failing, marketing alone is not going to save your biscuits.
Frederick Mountain Group provides marketing consulting and implementation, but it looks a little different. We start by asking clients about their goals. Then, we look at the problems or challenges preventing the business from reaching its goal, and craft a plan that might or might not include a marketing campaign.
Recently, we helped a client identify her goals and then created a plan that would quickly bring her to her goals. We analyzed her services and determined which services were profitable and which services would be the easiest to expand without diluting the quality of the customer experience. THEN, we decided what we were going to market and how we would position the message. Guess what happened? It worked!
From the client, “I sent out the pre-promotion email we discussed and by the end of the day we generated a significant amount of “service bookings.” The client went on to say that the increase in bookings more than offset the cost of our consultation. Put another way, we successfully figured out how to sustain a doubling of revenue every month, taking the business from $60k annually to $120k annually.
Here are a few real-life examples of when marketing is not going to save you . . .
Example 1: Your frontline staff is messing up, big time. Your staff is lazy, rude to you and your customers, and shows no initiative or concern to make your business better. Your customers are complaining, profits are falling. Will marketing solve this problem? No, marketing will bring more people to your business to be mistreated and poorly served.
Example 2: You are not exactly sure which services or products drive your company’s revenue. You have a diverse product/service offering, you are not sure which services are making your company profitable and which products/services are popular with your customers, or even how to make the popular products/services the profitable ones. Marketing is only going to help you get lost, and possibly waste time, bringing more customers to your business, a business that does not have a focus or a goal.
Example 3: You are not a salesperson and you don’t have a single salesperson on your staff. You have nice people and they provide excellent customer service. But, there are no hunters, nobody out there changing maybe’s and no’s to yes’s. Spending money marketing your business will increase your sales number, but it will not help you capture all the potential business you are missing.
