8 mistakes that limit marketing effectiveness

8 mistakes that limit marketing effectiveness

©Inspirit Marketing


The big eight

Pay lip service to your brand

No meaningful point of difference

Fail to plan your communications

Forget to focus on the customer

Place tactics ahead of strategy

View outsourcing as an overhead

Fall victim to the silos mentality

Measure activities in the wrong way


Pay lip service to your brand This signifies you talk about your brand more than you live the brand. Remember, actions speak louder than words. Once your brand strategy is decided, your brand identity in place, and your style guidelines sorted, it’s time to live the brand. The nitty-gritty of brand management then has to swing into action across your business and across all corners of the customer experience. In your business everyone is a custodian of your brand and has responsibility for making the brand felt. Irrespective of the department your customers deal with, they expect brand consistency in every interaction, from the back end to the front end. To know if you’re being consistent, test your brand performance yearly. Make it a habit to audit your business and report back on current performance. Make corrections as needed. Dynamic businesses are always open to improvement and continually strive to make the most of their brand.

Risk Factors:

• Poor brand experience leads to customer disenchantment. Where there’s no attachment, there’s no loyalty and no clear reason to choose you.

• A poorly managed brand results in a compliance burden. Marketing time is spent putting out fires rather than on strategy to grow the business.

• Reduced impact for your effort for little return. A lack of brand focus keeps those spinning wheels turning and creates overheads the business can do without.

Failure to live your brand results in an inauthentic brand experience and demonstrates your business lacks direction and doesn’t know its purpose.

No meaningful point of difference Differentiation is easy to say, harder to do. You might think you’ve differentiated your business although your customers might think otherwise. A Harvard Business Review article referenced a survey which revealed 80% of managers said they believed their company was strongly differentiated, but fewer than 10% of their customers agreed. The only ‘difference’ was found to be the space between perception and reality. To find your point of difference, identify a quality that only you own and that no other company can claim. ‘Owning it’ means expressing it through your brand and everything your business does, all the time. The stronger your claim, the further your business will sit in the mind of your customer versus your competitors.

Risk Factors:

• ‘Me-too’ positioning makes it harder for your customer to choose you if they can’t discern your competitive difference.

• You remain in a fierce competitive space and your people need to work hard to earn business.

• You create an artificial ceiling on your sales, market share and profitability.

Never take on a point of differentiation you can’t deliver. The best differentiation will set you apart from your competition and strengthen your attractiveness to the customers you want.


Fail to plan your communications Every communication, whether to your colleagues or customers, requires an understanding of your audience, the key objective, your main message, and how, and how often, you intend to deliver that message. Whether you’re speaking with your internal or external audience, having a structured plan tests your thinking, supports your initiatives and their execution. Create a plan before you take action. Use it to support a change in business strategy, a deal pitch, a content management strategy, a new website launch, a recruitment drive, and the list goes on. The complexity of the initiative and what’s at stake will dictate the complexity of the planning process. If the project is small, don’t overcomplicate the plan. Keep to a communications planning structure that you’re likely to follow rather than a complex one you won’t use. The best communications plans ask and answer the right questions.

Risk Factors:

• Without a plan you leave yourself open to unexpected consequences throughout the process and unexpected cost.

• An initiative can take more time to complete as you deal with issues you didn’t anticipate during the process.

• You don’t secure the necessary internal support for your initiative and it falls short of your goal.

View the communications plan as a success plan to best understand its purpose. Take time to plan before taking action. Your strategic effort is a valuable investment to keep your initiative on track from beginning to end.

Forget to focus on the customer The deadliest mistake is to fail to make your customer the priority or fail to understand your customer’s needs. To determine whether or not your focus is out of place, check to see how easy it is for customers to do business with you at all stages of the relationship. If the experience is painless, you’ll invite more business. A solid customer focus creates clarity in all areas of your business and strengthens your business purpose. Everyone in the business works with the same goal and more time is spent on the customer than on internal competition. Test whether the actions of your business are customer-oriented or company-centric, and be prepared to change if the focus isn't right.

Risk Factors:

• Inconsistent or poor customer experience leads to lost sales

• More time and resources spent on internal politics than on customer satisfaction, funds allocated in the wrong direction

• It’s not hard for competitors to provide a better customer experience

The focus should always be on the customer. Without the customer at the centre of your operation, your business won’t grow or thrive.


Place tactics ahead of strategy With the explosion of marketing mediums and increased technology tools available to marketers today there are opportunities to save time as well as waste time. With so much choice, the smart way forward is make sure your strategy is set before you end up in a tactical whirlpool. Don’t confuse a strategic decision with a tactical one. If you focus on changing an aspect of your tactical marketing mix without evaluating whether a change is needed to your strategy, you’ll concentrate your valuable time and resources in the wrong area. All tactical activities need to align to a strategy - that's how you test their relevance. Lead with the strategy then find the appropriate tactic to execute. This is important to make sense of the countless shiny tactical choices.

Risk Factors:

• You’re working hard but not making the progress you expect

• Thinking new tactics (rather than the old ones) are the solution and wasting time evaluating them and draining your resources

• Not learning, staying stagnant

o amount of new funky tools will override the need to have a strategy first. Before any focus on the tactical decision, the strategic decision needs to take priority.

View outsourcing as an overhead When it’s important to get the right work done, re-evaluate what you’re currently effort, or access skills you don’t have, then outsourcing provides that solution to boost your business. Outsourcing, in whatever form you need it, delivers you the most benefit when used as a partnership. Successful entrepreneurs know they can’t do it alone, so they develop solid partnerships to strengthen or complement their efforts. They free themselves to accomplish more in other areas where their time is better spent. Just like the African proverb ‘It takes a village to raise a child’, outsourcing provides your team support, learning opportunities, offers flexibility and provides an ability to maintain momentum greater than you could achieve alone. Use outsourcing to not only stay afloat but benefit from another perspective if you’re too close to the issues. To get the most out of an outsourcing partnership: be clear about what you think you need; be open to questions you hadn't asked before; and be ready for suggestions that can improve your business practices.

Risk Factors:

• Trying to do it all yourself can reduce your speed to market and the earnings potential of your business

• When you stretch your team too far, it stretches your relationship with them and there’s human resources cost down the track

• A closed mindset might be symptomatic of other closed thinking in your business

Expand your business capability with the right external support. Use outsourcing as a solution to work smarter not harder.


Fall victim to the silos mentality Wherever your brand is present, marketing needs to be active in the business. And because your business and brand are one, marketing can't only happen in the marketing department. Every area of the company has a part to play, otherwise it wouldn't exist. Working across departments that don’t want to collaborate isn't always smooth but it’s worth understanding where the obstacles are and what can you learn from them. Creative challenges within partnerships can produce wonderful results; just think of partnerships like Lennon and McCartney, Jagger and Richards, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Ultimately all departments should align to the business plan and brand. Good ideas are shared ideas. Don’t worry where the idea came from, be the one who can execute it. For example, content doesn’t have to come from marketing, it's better sourced from the collective knowledge in the business. Take ideas from the bottom, top, and across your business.

Risk Factors:

• Not sharing means not learning and less opportunity for innovation

• Minimising your brand impact and diminishing the customer experience

• Not leveraging best of what’s on offer inside your company

Good ideas can come from anywhere in the business, be open and ready for them. Everyone in the business is responsible for the brand. Remember, it’s a team sport.


Measure activities in the wrong way How can you determine your success if you measure your initiatives with the wrong metrics? The only activities that matter are the ones that link to the bottom line. Regardless of whether or not you’re part of the C-Suite, it doesn't hurt to behave like you are. Act commercially and be aware of how your business measures results. To gain the support of your leadership team, report on metrics that have business value and use them to show how marketing expenditure is an investment in the business.

Risk Factors:

• Marketing viewed as a cost rather than an investment if results don’t link with the business’s strategic intent

• A lack of credibility will make it harder to be heard

• Difficult to get approval in the future for other initiatives

Demonstrate success by reporting on the metrics that relate to the bottom line and the activities that are aligned to the strategic plan. And remember these wise words: Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts. - Albert Einstein


About Inspirit Marketing Mary-Anne Webb is the Principal of Inspirit Marketing,, a

marketing consultancy for B2B and professional service firms to

achieve results that return a positive business impact. With over

25 years’ experience working with people centric, service

businesses Mary-Anne’s belief is a strong brand results from a

clear point of difference, and when coupled with great

communication, delivers faster results and stronger relationships.

The results Mary-Anne is known for range from industry award

wins, wider panel representation, stronger messages in collateral,

brand strategy clarity, brand identities that survive changing

trends, and repositioning businesses in their market.

Experience is backed by graduate and post graduate

qualifications in marketing as well as a Certificate IV in Design.

Mary-Anne brings a unique mix of strategic, analytical and

creative skills to support her clients' goals and kick the obstacles

that stand in their way.

CONTACT Mary-Anne Webb.

M 0421 610 844

E [email protected]

W www.inspiritmarketing.com.au

© Inspirit Marketing

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8 mistakes that limit marketing effectiveness