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You are Doing Marketing Wrong

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7/1/2017
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July 2017
You are Doing Marketing Wrong
By Kevin Suboski
Posted: 2017-07-01T15:41:00Z

Are you satisfied with the number of new clients you are getting? If you’re normal, you aren’t getting enough to meet your goals in business. So what’s wrong? First you have to figure out whether you have a marketing or a sales problem. Marketing is producing a public identity and getting strangers that would be your best customer willing to hear about your offer. Marketing systems produce leads. Sales systems turn those leads into paying customers. It is a “system” because there are several interconnected persistent structures that enable you market effectively.  Most people are at least minimally satisfied with their sales abilities but are not getting enough leads through their marketing system.

We are in the middle of radical shifts in marketing methodologies. Our marketing “common sense” comes from the era of mass marketing. Those ideas don’t work with our current reality. If you want to significantly improve your marketing you need to rethink your whole Marketing System.

Successfully marketing your business requires more than just a good brochure or website. Those are just tactics. Generally people put all of their attention into tactics without artfully focusing on the other three layers of your Marketing System.

The four layers of your marketing system are:

  1. Constitution,
  2. Strategy,
  3. Plan,
  4. Tactics

Constitution

All businesses need to be constituted. For your business to “appear” powerful and seductive to your target market your business needs to “exist” for them. You make the business exist through language and images and other actions. Those actions trigger people to “know” who you are and whether you are an offer of help to them to address their concerns. If you don’t know who you are, who you help and how, then you can’t communicate anything coherent to your target market. The lack of a coherent, compelling Constitution is the single biggest problem in small business today. People struggle to articulate their business and feel their collateral isn’t quite right. They think it is a working problem, but really they don’t know who they are. Fix this and the right words and images will follow.

Strategy

Once you know who you are then you can figure out your marketing Strategy, which is essentially the strategic insight into that will attract your best prospects to come to you like a moth to a light. By specifying clear criteria of what differentiates your best customer from the masses you get clarity on who matters to you. You also need to clearly articulate how you are different from others that would serve those same customers. With those two things clearly specified you can create powerful messaging that will pull people to you like a magnet.

Tactics

Ultimately you will need to communicate your message to where your target market locates with words, images and actions. That list of tools that you use to communicate your message and provoke your target market to become leads are all of the marketing tactics of your business. This is where most of marketing energy is spent in business. While it is required, most tactics are created without the context of a powerful constitution and strategy. Without the guidance of Constitution and Strategy, Tactics are confused and weak and people do not get the results they want.

Plan

What will you “do”? The Plan specifies which actions you will be in to communicate your message. Your target market collects in some ways that you can “send” your messages via some “conduit”. Most plans companies produce are vague and do not allow you to intelligently accumulate information about what works and what does not. Your plan should be complete and rigorous so that you can collect numbers and other data to evolve to the realities in the marketplace. We develop the Marketing System in our heads. Having a rigorous Plan allows us to compare our notions of how the world works with how it ACTUALLY works and make course corrections.

Just Start! Collaborate, Then Iterate

To create a great Marketing System takes some effort and time to ensure that all of the parts are coherent and are operational. Using the tools of the Entrepreneurial Operating System will guide you to having a brilliant Marketing System. Start with your best guess and iterate often until you get to the point where you think it represents you well and you love it. You will also need to talk to many people. It is very difficult to develop a great system on your own. In our Peer Group sessions we put together six business owners to brainstorm together to help each other see their business anew. The results are dramatic. If you do this, you will have more leads than you can handle and you can get the number of customers you desire.

Kevin Suboski works with small business owners to help them get more of what they want from their business. If you want to have a coherent, grounded and compelling Marketing System and get more out of your business contact Kevin at kevin@suboski.com or (734)223-5164

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