The marketplace is the sole arbiter of the success of your programs. It alone determines what works and how. Ignore that at the peril of your business.
In spite of the fact you may love your business, product, or service, never allow your love of such things to override the results of your market testing.
Design and pursue an effective process of testing everything. Testing often has the reputation of being too complicated or expensive, but it does not have to be either complicated or expensive.
For example, you can test your advertising programs simply by having your receptionist or salesperson ask where a prospect learned of your business.
While this is very simple and effective, I have been amazed how frequently a business has no formal method to record and analyze the results. Business owners who do this will too often say, “We collect this data.” When I ask to review the results, I am then told, “Well, we simply get a ‘feel’ for it.”
While a “feel” may be reassuring, it is certainly far from scientific and very ineffective for planning or adjusting marketing plans and programs.
If you insist on failing to test, failing to use the data you have at your fingertips, or failing to follow what the marketplace is shouting to you about your business, you invite failure. The more you ignore these things, the more quickly will be your failure.
Another thing to keep in mind as you decide whether you will follow the information the marketplace is providing you is, that if a competitor hires a good marketer, you will have little hope against that competitor.
It is so easy to build an excellent, thriving business with the consistent application of good marketing principles, it is almost sinful to avoid doing so.
I urge you never to allow a complacent attitude toward effective marketing drag your business over the brink of failure. Well, perhaps not failure, but at least limping performance. It that what you really want for your business?
To your business success!
Paul Elliott
Marketing With Unbelievable Guarantees!™
http://www.MarketingSuccessBlueprint.com/blog
© 2008, Paul Elliott, All rights reserved world wide.
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1 response so far ↓
1 AnneMarie Callan // May 25, 2008 at 3:46 am
That is quite a profound article and brings home the fact that we spend so much time focussing on completing a product … learning about how to drive traffic,
but to what …
a run of the mill salesletter with a confusing or uninspiring headline.
When we are too close to the subject ourselves we miss some vital elements of marketing and I for one am going to make sure I test, test and test again.
That was a great article
AnneMarie
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