5 Message Killers You Must Avoid In Marketing

When learning from others, one of the best things to learn from them is their mistakes. The following is a list of the five most common mistakes made by marketers everywhere.

The #1 Killer - Stressing Image Over Substance

Image advertising is all about you and your business. How great you are, your qualifications, years in business, full-service product line, etc. But your prospects do not care about you, they care about themselves. Anyone reading or listening to your ad has one question in mind:What is in it for me? Simply put, an image ad has no way to track results. Its goal is to keep the company name in front of the public and often tries very hard to be clever. Watch any beer and soft drink commercials and you will know what I mean. By contrast, a direct response ad is trackable using codedresponses like: ask for John Miller. You know exactly which ads prospects are responding to. This helps you measure the effectiveness of each ad.

Killer #2 Not Taking Time To Educate

Your main objective should be to educate your prospect using several steps. Your first ad should get their attention and spark their interest enough to contact you. Your next may be purely educational. If your prospect still does not bite, your next step should be to provide more information using follow-up marketing techniques.

High-ticket items require an extensive one-on-one educational and sales process. Your prospect needs to be educated about the benefits of your products or services, their options, why yours is better than your competition, why you are charging the price you charge, and a host of other things. Lower-priced items can be sold in a one- step model and in many cases they have to be because an extended multiple step marketing campaign is too expensive to run. The trick is to give your prospect a reason to continue investigating your offer in the first advertisement.

Killer #3 - Not Explaining the Price

If you price is very low why? If your price is very high why? These questions need to be answered in the minds of your prospects in order for them to be comfortable with how much they will pay. If you are going to advertise a low price, give your prospect a reason why. Price is one of the primary factors that motivate a prospect to call or visit your store. Throwing your price out there with no explanation (justification), especially if it is a high price, is suicide.Your prospect must be given a reason WHY your price is what it is at the same time as they learn that price.

Killer #4 - Bowing to Public Opinion

I am going to be very brief and to the point about this mistake. You should not care what your friends and family think about your ads. What is important is what your customers think about your ads and the only way to find that out is by letting them vote with their wallet. Full stop!

Killer #5 - Forgetting to Track and Test

There is no worse, no costlier mistake than not tracking and evaluating the results of your ads. Not tracking your ads is like stumbling around in the dark. If you do not test your ads, you will never know how much money you may be leaving on the table! Your business simply can not afford this kind of guesswork.

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