Business marketing is one of those necessities of business that seem to cause business owners a lot of resistance, frustration and avoidance. businessmarketonline There are many ways to ruin your business marketing. These are the top ten ways you can ruin marketing for your business.
1) Never Market.
Count on reputation, “word of mouth”, and accident to bring new business to you. Imagine that marketing is not your responsibility. Believe that you’re so good at what you do that you shouldn’t have to market. Fantasize that your customers should throw money at you and demand your services without your ever doing any marketing.
2) Never learn about marketing.
Think of marketing as something “grubby” that you’ll do anything to avoid mastering. Believe that marketing is something you could never learn and make sure you don’t learn it.
3) Put together amateurish, do-it-yourself marketing materials.
Don’t hire professional. Grab some clip art and don’t worry about whether it looks good or makes sense to your target market. Make your own brochures on your printer. Don’t put any time or effort into your marketing writing. Don’t hire a professional marketing writer or pay for proofreading. Apologize for the poor quality of your business materials every time you give them out, or send someone to your website.
4) Be sure your marketing materials are all about how great you are.
Leave your prospects and their problems entirely out of the marketing writing. Be sure that you work hard to impress potential clients with your own brilliance, credentials, and background. Make sure that your business writing and website are ALL about you, and leave your target market out of your marketing.
5) Don’t create an effective elevator speech.
Fumble and mumble when you describe your business to individuals and groups. Don’t learn or get coaching to improve. Don’t worry about the fact that your audience doesn’t understand your description. Ignore the fact that no one ever comes up after your elevator speech to talk to you or ask you questions.
6) Don’t ever network.
This is a great way to ensure that you aren’t bothered by new business. No one will know who you are and develop trust with you. Don’t bother getting to know other people or learn about their businesses. Consider all that “interpersonal stuff” just a waste of time.
7) Never put together a professional website.
Don’t even have a website. You could hire the neighbor’s middle school son to build your business web site. You could do it yourself to save money. Get it hosted and forget about it. Never do any keywords optimization for the site.
8) Imagine that new clients should just come to you and throw money at you demanding your services.
Never learn that there is a workable process to help them achieve comfort with you over time. Just decide that it is entirely impossible to figure out how marketing works and don’t even try to learn what works.
9) Don’t learn about your prospects, their businesses, and their problems.
Never show interest in them or their lives. Bowl them over with the “hard sell” without ever assessing their interest or moving them through the sales cycle. Keep your attention focused on “closing the deal” – no matter where the prospect is in the sales process.
10) Make sure that your friends and family do not know what your business does or understand the problems you solve.
Keep them mystified enough that all they can say to describe your work is “some kind of consultant”. If you’ve kept them uninformed, you’ve done the perfect job of marketing yourself to your family and friends..
There are plenty of ways to ruin your business marketing. These top ten ways are guaranteed to keep your business marketing in ruination.
Suzi Elton provides business writing that attracts targeted prospects to your service business and converts them into clients for you. She is a Robert Middleton Certified Action Plan Marketing Coach, as well as a professional writer. Her website offers a free series of 8 assessments you can use to analyze your own site.
