Is your marketing team is effective? Are they doing well to generate leads and then converting them into the sales?
Well if you have the answers, then I am also having the reasons! You know what they say about the best-laid plans. Even if you had a great strategy, clear objective and commonly accepted sales goals, but still a thousand things are going wrong to push off your tracks. Then the question comes, what to do?
Marketing is an important aspect of any business. Successful marketing campaigns help increase revenue, generate more customers and increase overall brand awareness. However, not all marketing campaigns or strategies are successful. So, let’s face it, and try to get the reasons for which the marketing team is not going well.
Here are some good reasons why not, and what can be done to remedy them.
Table of Contents
1. You Did Not Have a Plan to Begin With
Setting sales is not a plan. Telling your sales team and/ or your leadership team (or board) what sales number you are going to hit this year (and in each month/quarter) is not a plan either. Do you know how you are going to get there? Have you quantified and planned the leading indicators to closed business?
Does your sales management team, your front-line reps, your marketing team and other supporting groups know exactly their role is to drive achievement of your number.
It’s never too late to create that plan, but without it you are just a leadership hoping to eventually find the horizon.
2. Missed Goals
Consistently missing your marketing goals or objectives is another sign of ineffective marketing. All marketing strategies should include measurable goals, such as increasing revenue by a certain percentage or generating a specific number of new users or customers. Marketing strategies also include budgeting goals to cap the money spent implementing a marketing campaign. Although it’s acceptable to miss goals on occasion, successful marketing campaigns meet or exceed most goals laid out in a marketing strategy or plan.
3. It’s Poorly Designed or Presented
It is reasonable to assume that “any marketing is better than no marketing” and that is very true, but if our business is to progress out of “shoestring startup” mode, we must move past the point of having to use “quick and dirty” marketing tools; at one point or another we must honestly assess the quality of the communications we are sending out.
Your promotional pieces are your ambassadors and their degree of polish and professionalism say a lot about who you are, your degree of success and how your business operates. Even if you have a very low budget, hiring a communications professional (copywriter, graphic designer and/or artist) to create your flyer, email or brochure can be well worth the cost in terms of response rates.
4. TMI (Too Much Information)
We all like to talk about our own businesses – our skill sets, our awesome products, company backgrounds, etc. There is nothing wrong with that until we start overwhelming our marketing communications with longwinded descriptions and detailed feature lists that result in large blocks of small-type text that present no visual interest in our page and that no one will bother to read.
We should remember that marketing and selling are two different things. In marketing you should not try to fixed the deal, instead your major aspire should be to inform people what your product/service is all about. You are just trying to contact them, and allowing them to know and get aware of your product or the service.
Sometimes too much information about you would make the customers weird and confused to carry further with you and your company.
5. Revenue Is Down or the Same
The overall goal of marketing departments is usually to increase a company’s revenue. Therefore, if a company’s revenue doesn’t change, or if it decreases, then the marketing team isn’t doing its job well. You must factor in the current economy: In a down economy, for example, slight revenue decreases are expected. But if a marketing team can’t increase revenue in a positive or stable economy, that’s a sign of ineffective marketing.
6. Anticipating With Old Challenges
If you are sticking with all those old challenges and goals, then it’s time to get out of those. Instead of focusing on the same challenges, you should try to expand the scope of the project or change the team’s objectives so its goal becomes more challenging to members. For example, tie the new initiative to a corporate strategic goal or add some new tasks to the team’s repertoire after appropriate training. Whatever the new task, there will be elements that team members will have to learn. As long as the training is provided in stages and the new responsibility isn’t overwhelming, team members should feel more valued.
7. Encourage Internal Stakeholders to Join the Team
New members can bring fresh perspectives to the group and generate renewed enthusiasm for the project. Listening to other teams’ war stories can also kick start a burned-out team. Inviting visitors who have an investment in the team’s project to the team’s meeting will remind members of the importance of the team’s mission.
8. You are Selling the Same Way to Everybody
The perception of a human being varies from person to person. Along with, the wants and selection also differs. A marketing team should understand these things and needs to stop following the rocket science method to display them to the consumers.
Instead of using the same techniques, you should try to innovate something unique for different customers. Take advantage of and embrace those differences in the way you sell. If you do so, then you will find far more prospectus interested and engaged at the top of the sales process.
