There are many questions that you must answer to make your marketing more effective. They include:
- Do you have difficulty navigating the "marketing maze"?
- Do you ever wonder why your marketing is failing to produce the results that you want?
- Do you wonder what you have to do to connect with potential customers so they will do business with you? Do you have a reasonable budget for advertising?
- Are you interested in growing your business?
- Do you have a business plan? Do you have a strategic plan and a marketing plan?
- Can you answer the question, “Why should I buy from you and not your competitor?
- Can you make a compelling argument for your company over a competitor?
- Have you conducted a SWOT analysis?
- What advantages do you have over your competition?
- What does your competition do better than you do?
- Where do you excel?
- Have you defined your customer?
- Have you crafted a mission statement so your employees know why you are in business?
- What is your unique value proposition?
- Have you defined business goals for this year and next year?
The better that you know your business, the more effective your marketing will become. Marketing is a system. It interacts with all areas of your business and you must integrate these areas to be effective.
In my Marketing Maze seminars, I teach contractors to tie all these areas together to create a comprehensive marketing and advertising plans that works. By tying all of these areas together, you increase the effectiveness of your marketing efforts by targeting specific customers and by promoting your uniqueness. This is known as strategic marketing.
Many if not most contractors are prone to use the, "I’ll try it" method of marketing. With the "I’ll try it" method, an advertising salesperson comes to you with an opportunity that has the right price and sounds like a good idea so the contractor says, “Oh that sounds good, I’ll try that and see if it works.” If you haven’t done your homework, you may not know how to maximize your impact and you may not get the biggest return on your investment.
The "I’ll try it" method almost assuredly leads to failure, although luck does sometimes play a part. Strategic marketing, on the other hand, if done correctly usually works. There is always some variation and anything has the potential to fail but strategic marketing has a much, much higher rate of success. When you are investing your money, you want to make sure, you have a greater chance of successfully reaching potential customers and to entice them to do business with you.
Marketing and advertising are connected but they are not the same. Marketing is a broad system that you can describe as a management process that involves communicating the value of your products and services to potential buyers by involving the four “P’s” product, price, place, and promotion, and the creation of strategies to accomplish those goals. Advertising is the process of creating and placing paid announcements in various media to announce a product or service to potential customers with a call to action that instills a desire to purchase.
To market your business effectively, you must do your homework so that you can create the strategy to reach the potential customers who will buy your products and services. You do this by doing all of the hard work of analyzing your business and asking yourself, what you want your company to be when it grows up. You have to know where you are going or as Yogi Berra said, “You might wind up somewhere else.”
Once you have answered all of the above questions honestly, you will begin to get a picture of where you need to focus your attention, and you will know what to promote. Every dollar you spend in advertising should return to you a minimum of $6 for every $1 invested in advertising. Track your leads to measure which advertising initiatives produce the highest return on investment.
Andy Fracica is the author of Navigating the Marketing Maze, he is, a speaker, a marketing coach, and president and CEO of Fracica Enterprises, Inc., a consulting firm specializing in marketing, and social media strategy. He has over 30 years of sales, marketing, and product management experience in the heating ventilating and air conditioning (HVAC) industry. He concentrates on helping companies deliver their message in an ever increasingly crowded market by helping HVAC dealers more effectively market their businesses without breaking their budgets. Contact him at 260-338-4554, [email protected] or visit the Fracica Enterprises, Inc., website.
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