Your marketing must support your business reality
People who misunderstand marketing often think the goal is to create and emphasise the gap between reality and perception. In my opinion, getting a sale is not the end goal for marketing, it is gaining a customer.
To achieve this, whatever product or services you sell, your marketing must emphasise what you do well, and not what you wished you did well.
Customers not sales
Obviously making sales is the goal for any business, but the way you go about it will make a huge difference to your long-term success.. A one off sale is just that, a one off. If you get a lot of these then you are doing well.
However, if your marketing is focused on just getting that one sale alone no matter what, where is the repeat business?
Don’t forget, it is cheaper to keep a customer than it is to acquire one. If you take the approach your marketing’s purpose is to gain customers, you are now building a base that buys regularly and refers new customers to you.
So how do you do this?
Marketing is a function not a paradigm
Approaching marketing on its own terms, disconnected from the realties of the business, is putting your business on the path to high customer churn and low customer satisfaction.
This will quickly evolve in to a poor reputation within the market which in turn soon has a negative impact on sales. No business wants to be in this situation.
Why does this happen? Because the reasons people are buying from you do not come from a place of truth.
If your marketing is based around what you wish the brand did well rather than what it actually does well, customers will become frustrated and disenfranchised with you. This is the gap between the promise and delivery.
Marketing must come from a place of truth
Marketing must reflect what a business does well. For example, if product quality is poor, but prices are low then the marketing must compete on price and not try to position the brand as a high quality product.
On the flip side, if prices are high, but customer service is great, then your marketing should not pretend to be cheap and should focus on the support services.
Working on your own terms is the easy way out for marketing, and a lot of marketers take this approach, I’ve seen it. It makes life so much easier, but it also has a harmful effect on the very business you are marketing.
Every business has an angle you can use as a hook, you just need to identify it and accept it, rather than wish it were something else.