Thursday, November 13, 2014

Your marketing is boring your best customers

Too much marketing is boring.

Too many Facebook posts are preachy, company-centric, and they read as if the writer is more interested in fulfilling an editorial quota than in having a dialog.. Web sites are so jargon-laden that a potential customer has no idea what the company does.


Reality check: If you have stopped paying attention to your company's marketing message, chances are so have your customers and best prospects.

How does this happen? Here are the most typical reasons:

  • The marketing team doesn't understand the personality and culture of your company (or even worse, your company doesn't have consensus about its own culture)
  • Marketing is kept out of key discussions and can't speak authoritatively about the product (service, mission, purpose)
  • Marketing is shunted off to a side and never interacts with sales, with customers, with prospects
  • You are over-managing the marketing projects to the point where the team has no sense of personal responsibility
  • You don't have clear expectations about what marketing should be accomplishing
Marketing should meet a need, not just be "doing stuff." It is your voice, your personal interaction with customers, potential customers, and the larger community.

Don't be the pompous bore at the table who is mostly irrelevant and largely meaningless.