According to Jay Levinson and Seth Godin (two of my Marketing-Role-Models), There are Three reasons that Marketers fail:
Lack of Commitment
If you do not believe in your product, or if you are not regular and consistent in the way you promote it, the odds of succeeding go way down. The primary function of a marketing plan is to ensure that you have the resources and the wherewithal to do what it takes to make the product sell.
Lack of a CLEAR Benefit
I like to call this a Unique Selling Point. As Jay and Seth put it “It seems obvious but few marketers understand that you must sell something that people WANT”” Without getting close to your customer, doing the research, and looking hard at what you have to offer your unlikely to stumble onto a hit. Many companies simply look at their skills or their factory and invent a new product or service that is easy to make. Remember Customers do not care about your skills or inventory – they want to know what is in it for them.
Poor Positioning
The concept behind positioning is simple: find a hole and fill it. People pick one or two attributes to associate with a product and then file that information away. Then the time arises that they need those attributes then the product comes to mind. Positioning become important as more and more products hit the market. Consumers are becoming immune to traditional marketing tactics. They don’t have enough room in their brains to store all that information.
Writing a marketing plan is important because unlike other aspects of your business, marketing involves unquantifiable risks. There is no way to know how your print ad will perform, how many people will come to your grand opening, read your eNewsletter or become a Facebook fan.
Jay and Seth refer to an analogy first told by Zig Ziggler; that of an airplane pilot who takes off on his flight from Dallas to New York, gets blown off course, and then returns to the DFW airport to start again. His point was that very few flights would be successful if the dealt with all set back in this manner.
One way to deal with this uncertainty is to ignore it. Many, many businesses just plod along, they invest money when the market is good and cut back when the economy goes down. The goal of a marketing plan is to enable you to see your ultimate goal with clarity and will make minor setbacks seem unimportant.
While a comprehensive marketing plan can be a vital component to any business plan, it’s often neglected by small business owners, online business owners and webmasters, and independent or creative professionals, for a few reasons:
- They simply don’t want to put the effort into writing a full marketing plan.
- They’re too short on time to write a comprehensive marketing plan.
- They don’t know how to write a marketing plan, and are flustered by the process.
That is what we are here for – to help make it easy. Please enter your information to download our Marketing Plan Template.
