Is Your Marketing Department Missing the Mark?
Marketing has one purpose – Bring prospects and customers to your business. If your company is focusing on Content Marketing, your marketing department has to work closely with your sales department. The department’s goal is to generate leads. It then guides these leads in understanding why they need the product or service your company has. Finally, it shows them why your company is the best one to provide this product or service to them. At that point they turn the lead over to the sales department to make the sale.
Let’s look at 2 different companies.
Company A
The marketing department at this company does not have one unifying objective of what they want to accomplish with their marketing. They don’t have any significant theme they want to emphasize.
Lack of Focus
Not Written for Their Ideal Prospect
No Singular, Consistent Voice
Any marketer can see this by reading through the marketing materials they have produced over the last few years. Their marketing people have not had a consistent focus.
- At one point, they tried to emphasize they were a cutting-edge company – really at the forefront of new technology that was coming along. Their products had the latest features just developed.
- They then switched. Their marketing emphasized the fantastic customer service they offered. It was the best in their field. None of their competitors could match it.
- Most recently, their marketing is stressing they’re the low-cost leader for the products they offer. Their prices will not be beat.
The second challenge they have had is their marketing pieces have not been written for their ideal prospect. Their ideal prospect is a high school or college graduate. Yet, the language in most of their marketing pieces has been extremely technical. Their ideal prospect has difficulty understanding what is being said
The third challenge this company is consistency. Many different people wrote marketing pieces over the years. Unfortunately, they had a wide variety of styles. There was no singular, consistent marketing voice.
The last challenge they have is none of these past marketing pieces have been removed from their website. All of the blog posts, articles, case studies and white papers are there. They are not dated. People coming to the website have no idea of when these were written. What is this company? If they were interested in the product this company offered, what could they expect from this company?
Company B
The marketing department at Company B is inconsistent. They seem to bounce from one marketing technique to the next.
There is No Consistency in Their Marketing
At best their marketing I sporadic.
Years ago, they started a monthly blog. They were enthusiastic about it. And for the first year, they religiously did a new post every month. Then the frequency fell off. First it was bimonthly – then quarterly. Now it’s lucky if they post any at all.
Then they turned to emails. They followed up by emails with any prospect who contacted their company. They sent them product information in emails. They also kept them current on what was happening at their company. Suddenly a switch was made and the emails were less and less frequent. Now emails are sent sporadically.
They then turned to articles. New articles were done quarterly for the first year. Then they dropped off to semiannually. Now they’re lucky to get one up every year.
The same thing happened with case studies and white papers.
Now they’re thinking about doing some videos and maybe even a video sales letter.
Company B truly has a great product. However, their marketing is inconsistent. The people who can benefit from it don’t know anything at all about it.
Where is Your Marketing Department?
If your marketing department is like those at Company A or Company B. you’re losing prospects and sales. What steps do you have to take to keep that from happening?
Take time right now. Review your marketing. Is there a consistent focus in everything your marketing department has produced? If the focus has changed over the years, has the Marketing Department gone back and removed those pieces from your website which highlight anything other than where your focus is now?
One of the easiest ways to avoid problems like this is to have one particular person or a team of people in your company in charge of everything your marketing department produces. Make this person or team responsible for the underlying tone, focus and intent of all your marketing. Make sure they share with anyone writing any of your marketing.
The person or team also determines which marketing pieces are needed and when. They determine when new case studies and whitepapers are needed. They also specify when emails, blogs and articles are needed to reinforce the information contained in the case studies or whitepapers.
Another responsibility of this person or team is to make sure every marketing piece is written in the same voice. Different people can write different pieces. However, they have to see how each prior piece has been written and have to write in the same style. Doing that will insure readers won’t be confused when they read different pieces of your marketing.
Your marketing has to be an asset to your company and to selling the products or services you offer. Following what I have outlined here will help you do that.
