Why Most Marketers Fail
There are lots and lots of reasons why marketers fail, really, but there’s one BIG giant reason why you keep missing your goals: you play it safe.
Part of me gets this. Really. In the old pre-Web days, you paid through the nose to get print collateral out the door. You had to live by certain constraints (get it to the printer on time, distribute it a certain way, multiple signoffs along the way). You agonized over the copy, the design, every little aspect of branding. Usually in committee.
If your brochure or poster came back with so much as the wrong color register–better redo it! At huge expense.
So yeah, you had limited budget, unlimited micromanagement overhead and a bunch of sissies hanging around worrying if the new logo might not offend some unheard-of demographic who probably don’t even buy your product.
The end result? Your collateral had to be as drab, boring, and vanilla as possible. You only had the money for one brochure, not five or six. So what if you really needed to target C-suite executives differently than you did the software engineering managers or the QA geeks? It’s all the same, right? They’ll just pass the brochure along with little helpful notes stuck to them! Because everyone loves brochures! Let’s go read one right now.
Guess what? You live in a new world! Your customers want to read blog posts about you, subscribe to RSS feeds, tweet about you, bookmark you on Delicious, yack about you on forums. If they can’t find you, they’ll just talk about you like you weren’t even there, which, if you think about it, is pretty true.
The problem is, you may be living in this brave new world but you haven’t bothered to remove the shackles and blinders from the old world. It’s like you’re wearing some kind of lo-jack on your leg. Out here, you can create exquisitely targeted emails, blogs, and landing pages. (Hardly anyone bothers.) You can create authentic voices that don’t sound like the product of a brain-dead committee of MBAs. (That’s way scary!) You can be sassy, peppy, and full of life. (Oops, let the lawyers review the web copy first! That’ll zing it up.) You can show how much you love your product and how excited you are about the space you’re in. (I just work here.)
Out here, NICHE IS NICE! In fact, niche is to marketing as design is to competitiveness. Good design (see: iPod) can lead to more sales (see: Apple’s recent great numbers). Stodgy crap (read: anything Microsoft) can lead to missed numbers and layoffs.
Same goes for you, my marketing brethren and sisthren. Focus. Reach out to a niche. Don’t have a clue what niche you need to be in? Your customers will tell you! Doesn’t matter what business you’re in, there’s an untapped, undiscovered niche of people thirsting for some attention and devotion. They’re the 20% of your customers who give you 80% of your sales. Or might, if you would just listen to what they’re already saying!
Believe me, if you give them some love, they’ll reward you with sales, and profits, and glory, and fame, and galactic conquest! (Oh wait, sorry about that.)
Now go out there and WIN.
