Do you ever find yourself thinking or worse, saying things you wish you could take back? It can be pretty humiliating if this happens when you are in a meeting in front of peers and one of these phrases slips-out accidentally. I am referring to phrases that make us all sound unintelligent. We’ve all done it, and wish we could crawl under a rock and hide. Here are a few I experienced via blog discussions and even with other business professionals in personal conversations.

 

“Customers Have Always Come To Us, Why Should We Spend Time Trying To Figure Out Who Our Personas Are?”

This is a huge mistake that companies make. Just because your sales team have been order-takers for years doesn’t mean they always will be or should be. Competition will challenge your brand and eventually steal precious market share if you’re not careful and purposeful about how to market your product to your customers. In this case, invest some time and money in figuring out who your customers are. If a company has healthy sales numbers and the phone is ringing frequently, this may not be an important exercise. However, this most likely will not last forever and you do not want to wait until a crisis occurs before you start. Smart marketers know customer traits very well and can create content that is relevant and timely for those customers based on those traits. If you know your customer and their attributes at a deeper level, you will be able to do this more effectively and in a cost effective manner. Creating personas is a great way to start.

 

“In Awareness Marketing It Is Very Difficult To Measure ROI, Therefore We Don’t Engage In Those Types of Initiatives”

Awareness is at the top end of the sales funnel. It can be very difficult to attract and lead your prospective customers deeper into the funnel without awareness-level marketing. This type of marketing can be difficult to measure all the way to the bottom line. However, without it, your deeper funnel activity will suffer and thus conversions may also suffer. The lesson here is, create awareness-level marketing as a feeder system to your deeper funnel areas and you will find out that your pipeline will continually filled with more qualified leads.

 

“We Don’t Need To Look At Our Google Analytics – We’re Not selling Products Online”

 

It doesn’t matter what your company sells. Your online presence and traffic is an indication of who’s coming to your website and if they are interested in the brand and/or the products and services you are offering. Low traffic can mean several things, your SEO is weak or non-existent, your digital footprint is small and needs to be expanded, your social media is not linked to your website or your paid advertising is reaching the wrong audience. These are just a few of many reasons. Either way. Your Google Analytics should be monitored at least once a month to give you an idea of your traffic volume and trends. It may also give you some idea if your campaigns running in the market are why your web traffic is spiking. The more information you have the better you will be as a marketer.

“We Don’t Need To Be Innovative, That’s For Tech Companies”

 Yes, tech companies can be perceived as more innovative than most. However, that doesn’t mean other companies are not innovative and should not even think about being innovative. Businesses must look ahead, not behind. It’s not just the big tech companies that need to do this. Every business must innovate to compete. They must create new products and services for new markets. Businesses must be creative, and come up with new ideas that never would have been thought of before. This is the new management paradigm. Get used to it, it’s not going away anytime soon. Here’s what will happen. Everything will speed up. Processes, functions, data, inventory turns and speed to market, will force employees to learn a whole new language called innovation. Business as usual doesn’t cut it any more.

“Content Marketing Will Never Work For Us, Our Customers Won’t Respond To That Type Of Marketing”

Every time I hear someone communicate something like this I instantly think, “they really do not know how powerful content marketing can be.” Let’s do a quick refresher. Content marketing is creating content that is highly targeted to reach your persona and meet their needs. Content marketing is also designed to answer their questions, meet them where they are in the buying process and alleviate some of their pain points – thus convert them to a customer faster. If a business knows their customer really well, then creating content to reach their customer would be relatively easy. Content marketing in essence is speaking like a human to a human.

 

You may not currently be one of those marketing professionals that slips-up once in a while. However, we’ve all done it, just admit it. This article will hopefully prevent a few more verbal zingers from causing all of us some angst.

YourBrandExposed is designed to look at digital with an eye into the future using a creative, innovative marketing perspective. We’re a consultative and tactical resource for companies looking to leverage the power of digital, web, social and content marketing strategies.

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Scott MacFarland

Web: www.Yourbrandexposed.com

Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/scottmacfarland

Twitter: @scmacfarland

Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/scott-macfarland/

Email: Yourbrandexposed@yahoo.com

Photo Credit: HubSpot

Graphic Credit: Canva

Sources:

 

http://knowledge.hubspot.com/contacts-user-guide/how-to-create-personas

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/scott-macfarland/why-innovation-management-is-important_b_4174482.html

 

http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2014/11/why-brand-speak-human/

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