Get ready to feel defensive, because I have you pegged, and I am going to tell you what you are doing wrong. I am going to share seven (of many) things that suck about your marketing efforts. These are things that you are doing wrong, or not doing at all which suck so bad it is like a vacuum cleaner pulling money right out of your pocket. I am not telling you how terrible you are at your marketing just so you can pout about it and leave nasty comments on my blog. I am telling you this so you can stop going broke and making bad excuses for your failures. Note that I am also not telling you this to sell you a solution, because if you are screwing these things up, you are probably not in my target audience. I get paid for my work, and if you are screwing up this badly, you cannot afford me.

Got it? OK then, pick up your bottom lip and stop drooling on yourself about all the money you are going to earn with this new information. I am not giving you the keys to the kingdom. I am just going to try and help your marketing to suck less. So let’s stop sucking and start fixing some of your marketing screw-ups.

This is not just about thinking bigger, but more about thinking outside of what you know … or rather, what you think you know. This is not an attack against you, or it must be attack against me, too. The fact is that we plain and simply do not know how much we do not know. Until we know it, and address those important but unknown issues, we stand to suffer many losses.

Some people will term it “thinking outside the box” but that is not natural for most people, and it can certainly hold its dangers in office politics. Let’s face it, independent and creative thinking is not encouraged enough. Most people think the way they are told to think. After all, that is most of what proper schooling is about. I respect the way Albert Einstein observed it with his statement as follows:

If you make your price the first priority in a cost to value comparison, you may want to reconsider. Cost is a fast way to get a lot of public attention, but it can also provide a negative net return. Showing a low cost has a solid place in some markets, but consider evaluating the cost and value propositions you present to your market. If you are building upon only an audience of “glancing prospects”, you may miss your best customers in the process. What I call glancing prospects are the ones who are out for cost, and that is the primary factor in their decision making. They glance in your direction and give little consideration to anything but how much it will cost. You may like these customers if you are content to offer the lowest cost, but they are also often not return customers or loyal to your brand. It is not just because you didn’t provide value, but because value is not what they were seeking. Thus, they never realized your value.

I work with marketing numbers every day in my business, but sometimes I like to break it down to an individual level and gather more specific opinions. I can’t be brilliant every day so some days I rely on my dear Mother. I did that today, and I asked her about marketing. Ironic, isn’t it?
Since my mother remembers the days before television, and when telephone lines were shared across multiple households, I figured she could provide a good representation of “old school” thinking about marketing. I asked her a very specific question as follows: “If you were going to market a [...]

Have you ever asked yourself what it will take to double your business? Adjust this question to your business however you like, but you should always be able to answer the question. If you operate very small or new business, doubling it is a pretty easy task. If you have been around a while and have a significant market share in your industry, this may be a pretty lofty goal. If you want to be “realistic” (by the way, realism is very subjective), maybe you want to increase your business by 15 percent, 25 percent, or 35 percent. Whatever the [...]