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Video: Four Issues That Will Derail Your Marketing

Reading Time: 5 minutes

The following transcript has been generated for your reading pleasrue. Please reference the video to insure its accuracy.

Introduction

Hello, and welcome. My name is Shane and today I going to talk to you about four issues that can derail your marketing before it ever gets started. Let’s get going.

Confusing Tactics For Strategy

This one doesn’t surprise me much as most of the marketing information out there focuses much more on tactics. It’s those things such as how to build a better landing page, doing keyword research, or building a better podcast.

These are all focusing on the “What”. What are you doing to help you achieve your goals?

Strategy is more high level. It’s worried about the “How”. So you have a goal, how are you going to achieve it?

If you’re thinking tactically, you’re thinking about, “What am I doing to achieve my goal?” What’s the work that I’m doing? Right?

If you’re thinking strategically, you’re thinking, “How am I going to do this?”

How always trump’s what, which means strategy trump’s tactics. You should always start with strategy before you move on to your tactics.

Vague or Unclear Goals

Now, I run into this one a lot with prospects and sometimes my clients as well. I ask them, “What are your goals?” and I get something really vague like, “To make more money.”

Well, how much more money? A dollar? $10? $100? A million dollars?

This is important, because the goal is a reason you’re doing your marketing in the first place, which is to say, you goals inform your marketing.

To avoid vague goals, you want to think smart, which means you want your goals to be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timebound.

So let’s back up a little bit.

A goal that is specific. Instead of saying, “I want to make more money,” you would say something more along the lines of, “I want to increase revenue by 15%.”

This is something that’s also measurable, because you can look at it at the end of the year and say, “Well, did I achieve this goal or not? Did I meet this 15% increase in revenue?” Yes or No.

You also want it to be attainable. Now, this one can be a little tricky, because you want it to be something that’s attainable, but you also want it to be a challenge. So if you made $500,000, this year, to say, “Well, my goal for next year is to make $510,000.” It’s probably something that’s a little too easy. Maybe something like $750,000 would be something that that balances a little bit more. Something that’s attainable and presents a challenge as well.

So I always think about attainable, if it’s attainable. If it’s challenging as well, you need to balance those two things.

Next is relevance. Is your goal relevant to your business?

If you run a computer manufacturing company, then saying that I want to build a better sub, well, your employees might like that idea and, maybe some of your clients will as well. Building a Better sandwich probably isn’t in the best interests of your business. So again, it needs to be relevant to what you’re doing.

Now, the last one is timebound, I kind of hit on this alreadybut you need to set a timeframe for when you’re going to hit the goal.

So is it the end of the quarter? Is going to be the end of the year? Is it going to be the in the next two years?

It needs to be something where you place a timeframe on it so you know how long you have to achieve it.

Not Connecting Marketing Goals to Business Goals

This is something that trips up marketers a lot.

Marketing does not exist in a vacuum. It is a business process, like accounting, like sales, like customer service, right? Those things have a role to play in a business. Marketing does as well.

But, marketing is connect to the bottom line of what’s important to the business, especially tosomebody like your CEO, CEO, the President.

If you’re social media marketing, and you come back and say, “Hey, we have more followers, we have more retweets, we have more likes, and we have more shares.”

That’s great, right?

But, the CEO may be asking, “So what? How did you add to the bottom line?” Right? That’s what’s important to the business goals, so, that’s what’s important to the CEO. So, you need to be able to answer that question.

Now, I don’t want you to think that marking is a remedy for everything. Because it’s not. If the goal is to build a new manufacturing plant this year, marketing doesn’t play a role in that.

After that manufacturing plant is open need to hire, there is a role the market can play.

You just need to make sure whatever marketing activities you’re doing, are always tying to the goals of the business

Not Having A Plan

Maybe you just don’t want to invest the time in creating the plan, right?

Because, it is, it’s an investment. It takes time to create a plan. It takes more time to create a great plan.

However, I think that’s bogus. The reason why is because if you don’t have a plan, you’re likely just out there doing things. Hoping that you get the result you want to get you to where you need to be. As I’ve been told, hope is not a strategy.

A plan should contain, at minimum, the things I’ve already discussed. A basic plan would include things such as:

  • These are the business goals
  • These are the marketing goals, how they tied to the business goals
  • This is the strategy that we’re going to use
  • These are the objectives
  • Thse are the tactics.
  • And this is how we’re going to measure everything.

Again, I know this takes time, but your plan is your guide, you’re going somewhere. Hopefully you identified where you want to go. But you have someplace to go and your plan is what’s going to help you get from where you’re at now to where you need to be.

Now, you may be thinking, “Hey, remember 2020?”

Yes, I remember 2020. It wasn’t a good year.

I created my plan in December of 2019. And, by the end of March of 2020. I kinda was just like, “The plan has been completely destroyed and it’s it’s only the end of March.”

However, when I pulled up my plan I saw something interesting, which was, it was still completely relevant.

There wasn’t really anything in there that I had to completely pull out because I was like, “This just doesn’t make sense anymore.”

Everything in there made sense because they took the time and was thoughtful about what I created.

I did have to make some adjustments to some of the goals that I had. I had to make some tweaks. I mean, it wasn’t pristine, I wasn’t good to go, I had to go in and make some changes.

But, I still found that had a good basis of a plan to get to where I want to go.

So, stop making excuses about not having a plan. If you are serious about getting to where you want to be. You need to take the time to invest in a plan that will help get you there.

Recap

Alright, those are four issues that can derail your marketing.

So, quick recap.

Number one: Confusing strategy for tactics. Remember to always focus on the “How” before you focus on the “What”.

Number two: Vague or unclear goals. Always make sure you’re creating SMART goals. Again, those are goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time bound.

Number three: Connecting marketing goals to business goals. Marketing does not exist in a vacuum, do not treat it as such. It is a business process. If you want to keep your budget and your job. Always make sure you’re connecting your marketing goals to the business goals.

And number four: Not having a plan. You need a guide to help you get to where you need to be. Take the time, please invest in a plan. Hope is not a strategy.

Those are the four issues that I see on a regular basis. I’m sure there’s more. Let me know in the comments what’s on your list. Until next time, see ya.

Shane Carpenter
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