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What are the reasons that prevent businesses from growth?
This month we are talking about barriers to growth while identifying the reasons why they occur and how they affect various aspects of your business. Sadly, marketing is one of the factors why businesses fail…
Let’s look at 5 reasons why:
1. Your marketing starts with your market.
Focusing on leads, conversions, and sales is a good idea when tracking your marketing efforts, but looking at your market is where it all begins.
As obvious as it sounds, let me ask you this – have you done your in-depth homework on your market before starting your marketing campaign?
Did you know that the natural tendency of most businesses, when they are just formed is to start focusing on sales right away with minimal research and business planning towards the needs and complexities of the actual market?
Yes, you need sales coming in ASAP when you start a new business – knock on those doors, make those phone calls. But do know your core customer well, before investing in marketing.
Ironically, even a well-established business might suffer from this. But the good news is it’s never too late to do the right thing!
This is exactly why we’ve designed our strategic package of Brand Audit + Marketing Strategy to revise the fundamentals of your business, to identify any blind spots and to create a strategy to correct them.
2. Your love for your customers will kill you.
It is sad, isn’t it? The very thing you are advised to do – understand and build a relationship with your customer – might bring you more harm in the future than good.
How so, you ask? As a business or marketing manager, it is your job to understand and get into your customer’s head, but if you pay too much attention to the “trees you will miss the forest”.
Globalization, instant gratification, and technological advancement are a few things to name here as the reasons why your industry (any industry for that matter) changes so fast these days. If you don’t pay attention to those changes, you might miss the shift in your market and you will be caring for the wrong customer because your core customer’s profile has changed.
Fall in love with the end result, with the benefit you deliver, with what you are good at, and what you can do better (than your competition) in your industry today.
Things change, people change, markets change – don’t get attached too much to either of those.
3. Your worst customer is your best marketing tool.
We all had them at one point or another. I dare to say that we have had nightmare clients in the past (and if you ask them, they probably will say that we were a nightmare to them). Without getting into much detail – I can say with 100% conviction that I am grateful for those instances. Every single conflict made our processes much stronger, our contracts more clear and our service packages more purposeful.
Don’t ignore bad experiences in your business. Turn them into positive ones by revising what YOU did wrong to attract this kind of client. How can you improve your processes to avoid this next time?
4. Your brand’s power lies in your inner conflict.
And since we are talking about conflict, let’s not forget any internal conflicts you might have. As we say around here – the future of marketing is branding – and branding is an inside job!
Do you have conflicts internally? Do you have core values that are not being followed?
Branding is a growing, evolving component of your organization and like any other rule in your life, core values are just that – they are rules about the way you agreed to behave as a company.
What happens when someone breaks a rule in life? Let’s take kids, for example, if you are a parent. What is the goal of a rule?
The goal of a rule is to reinforce the desired behaviour. The same happens in companies. It takes a while for core values to become habits, where everyone is in sync. The goal of your core values to constantly keep realigning and bring your team to achieve synergy. And that happens when we know each other and we understand each other’s differences, and that is impossible to achieve without conflict.
So before you can say that your core values work like a swiss watch in your organization, tell me – do you embrace conflict as part of your growth plan?
5. Your team is your marketing.
It’s hard to argue that people are the foundation of any company. How we interact with each other. How we treat each other. How much we trust each other and how much we respect each other.
Team [noun]
A group of people who come together to achieve a common goal.
A team is something that is achieved internally by every single person in a group, not a boss, who tells you that you are a team now because you are in the same department.
Being united by the same goal – even if it’s to make more money* – is a powerful thing, when everything clicks and everyone is moving fiercely in the same direction.
(*Hey, we are in Vancouver and housing prices are high – so this is a very valid reason to work hard together as a team to achieve a common goal of making more money).
So there you have it!
5 things no one will tell you about marketing. Or should I have titled it – 5 things that we don’t want to know about marketing? Or 5 things we ignore about marketing? Either way, do tell us which one is the most common in your opinion? Or maybe you have a different one on your mind?
Head over to our LinkedIn Page to share your thoughts and the most creative comment will be entered to win a free Brand Audit!
Did this article strike a chord with what’s going on in your organization? Do give us a shout and set up a discovery marketing meeting, we would love to see if we can help, or stop by our marketing agency in Vancouver, we always have chocolate!