Are You Spinning Your Marketing Wheels? Let’s Check!

Business is hard. Why is this so? Because business is complex. The people who make it look easy just know how hard and complex the movements of business are, and how many things can go wrong. This doesn’t mean that putting out fires is necessarily a sign of business success, but it’s a skill you will have to have.

With that in mind, it’s important to consider just what this kind of success is comprised of. A business is an entity more than a machine, and if one part or ‘organ’ suffers, the rest of your firm can too. Your marketing is perhaps one of the most immediately observable elements of this. Spinning your wheels can be a difficult experience, because no matter how much money you place in marketing, if it’s not effective, it simply won’t work. That can get expensive, because great marketing is rarely free.

For this reason, sometimes it’s best for your business to look itself in the mirror and to consider just what you’re doing wrong. In this simple guide, we’ll look at a few faults your marketing may have, and better ideas to solve them:

Weak Strategies

Weak strategies can be defined in one of various ways. Perhaps you don’t have ultimately confidence in your delivery methods, or in how this marketing strategy really relates to your business, despite appearances. Perhaps you failed to use services like RSM Marketing, and as a result, your SEO services haven’t been as well-geared as they could have been.

Maybe your marketing is just too generic. Think of a standard advertisement for a law term in your mind. Does it involve a person in a suit speaking to a client while sat on a high-backed executive office chair? Yes? Okay, but how does that distinguish between one of a thousand law firms? Your marketing should, ideally, be something that only really expresses who you are, not what you do. This way, your marketing can curate a sense of real personality, one to keep track of. That kind of effort really does make a difference going forward, and moreover, it gets noticed.

Lack Of Targeting

Of course, marketing is not just the effort of throwing a net into an ocean, but it’s about knowing where the fish are. Do you know who is most likely to buy your product? What calibre of client are you looking for? How much do they usually invest? Do you have the means to keep them around, and what are they looking for in your firm for that to be appropriate or even possible?

Of course, some firms just decide to consider these answers themselves, rather than actually looking and researching into what the answer might be. It could be that in the time of Covid, your demographics have changed. You might find that your marketing is actually quite insensitive considering how sensitive the times and peoples’ nerves are right now. This lack of targeting can unfortunately leave your firm barking up the wrong tree. Now, on the flip side, we must also make sure that we’re not limiting our approach too much. Overly focusing on one demographic can leave our company seeming brittle, too exclusive, perhaps way too discerning. These are not qualities you should want or need in your company if you’re struggling to drum up clients.

Vague Briefs

You may have invested in one of the most important marketing campaigns of your life, the most expensive, with the highest stakes involved. But even if you’ve used the most acclaimed firm there is, if you provide them with a vague brief, they can’t offer you anything unique.

Do you know what your company needs? It’s very easy to offset your marketing to another firm, who will do ther best job they possibly can, but they cannot know the depth of understanding that you have for your firm. What are your firms ideals? What do they represent? What’s your vision for the future? What’s your raison-d’etre? If you can answer these questions concretely, with care, attention, and interest, you’ll no doubt find that you have something worthwhile and heartfelt to offer. If not, then your marketing brief will look the same as a million others, generic, bland, tiring, and ultimately not noticeable. Those aren’t great ways for a marketing brief to be defined, no matter how positive your intentions are.

Ignoring Your Brand Image

Ignoring your brand image is simply a poor means of understanding how your firm is viewed. Sure, you as the leader know what you think of your firm. But what’s the first impression of someone being introduced to it? What does your logo suggest? What fonts used for your website and ‘about the team’ are used, and why choose those over others?

It can be helpful to run focus groups in this spirit. It can be worthwhile to consider the reviews of your products or services, and see if you can glean any insight from them. No matter what your business offers and where it’s positioned in the market, your brand image will often help dictate exactly what and why it’s there. For instance, consider how certain people relate to the brands you might know of. Tesla, for instance, is known as a visionary company led by a controversial yet highly engaging figure in Elon Musk. His public-facing Twitter candor combined with his highly effective and futuristic product offerings create this spellbinding image that, even if you dislike it, you can’t admit doesn’t have some sense of import.

Does this mean you need to copy those strategies to be successful? Far from it. But you do need to understand how your brand image operates, what it means, and from now into the future, how you can use it to your advantage. Simply knowing that can be an advantage, as in business, perception is often everything.

With this advice, we hope you can more easily avoid spinning your marketing wheels, instead gaining the traction you need for progress.