How good is your marketing choreography?

Good marketing is not made up of any one single activity, but a series of well thought out, complimentary and connected tasks.

Perfect marketing should resemble a well-choreographed musical number where planning, consistency, people, content, enthusiasm, communication and timing all come into play. And despite some people’s rather vocal thoughts, marketing really isn’t just advertising or social media, it’s so much more including:

- Direct Mail

- Telemarketing

- Digital (website/emarketing/SEO/PPC)

- PR

- Content (blogs/articles/editorials)

- Events

- Campaigns

- Networking

- Referrals

So when marketing goes wrong, and it does, there are often quite clear reasons why it has happened.

Below are the 15 main reasons why I think that marketing can fail.

  1. No strategy or plan in place
  2. Insufficient or unrealistic budgeting
  3. Lack of clarity about target audience
  4. Brand inconsistency
  5. Overcomplicating the message and the content
  6. Doing what you’ve done before without evidence of success
  7. Using one or too few channels so marketing is not fully integrated
  8. Too much focus on features and not enough on benefits
  9. Overpromising and under-delivering
  10. Getting swayed by new opportunities, channels and tactics so forget what actually works
  11. Undervaluing the importance of current customers
  12. Lack of business agility to respond to change
  13. Delivering on price rather than value
  14. Lack of accurate monitoring and measurement
  15. Expecting instant results

If you want marketing success, you need to make sure that you do your homework and put as much effort and resource behind marketing, as you would behind any sales or business generating activity. Because when marketing is done well, it can make all the difference to you, your staff and your business.