A majority of businesses today complain about the lack of sales thus revenue and consequent drop in profits.
Sales colleagues blame marketing for poor sales, sometimes not doing their job right to generate sales – doesn’t this sound familiar to you? True, advertising is one important way to bring customers into the website or to your retail store front. Before we delve into the details of advertising, let’s talk about what must go right for advertising to work.
Very simply, you must fulfil your promises. With the expansion of digital marketing, how many times have you seen the web site or advertising of some company, thought that they must be a big and reputable company, used their service – only to discover that the service they provided was way below your expectations? Did you become a repeat customer? Did you tell anyone not to go there?
If your ads portray a much better image of your business than it actually is, customers won’t stay. They may begin telling their friends not to come to you, so your advertising has just backfired. Social media platforms will kill your reputation in hours if you did not honour the promise.
On the other hand, there is a philosophy of ‘under-promise, and over-deliver’. Is this a good idea? In theory, over-delivering is a good idea, but under-promising is not. The business environment is getting a lot more competitive today. Customers won’t come to you if you under promise. If you can provide a service better than your competitors can, what’s the point of being humble and under-promising?
Tell customers proudly that you can do this, and amaze them when they come to you. Think about your advertisements right now. What are the places you’ve promised too much? What are the places you haven’t promised enough?
There are regulations in every country, there are ethics advertisers are expected to follow, there are social and cultural norms one has to bear in mind.
Don’t you experience breaking of promises by advertisers repeatedly?
Solution
Advertising is often the most expensive way to market your business.
If you think advertising is the same thing as marketing, you have just limited yourself to only using the most expensive way to market your business.
In fact, let me give you one method right now. Talk to 3 of your customers and ask them about their overall experience. What is the most dissatisfying thing about your product or service? Their answers will tell you exactly what you need to do to improve.
Most people think that if they spend Rs. X on their website and online marketing campaign, they will get Y amount of business. If you want to get more business, you merely need to spend more money in advertising, right? This is absolutely wrong.
Spending more money on advertising does not necessarily mean more business! More often than not, it just means you’ve spent more money, and you now have less money in the bank account.
Spending more on advertising may or may not be the key to bringing in more business. As you’ll learn, effective advertising requires you to deliver the right message to the right people at the right time in the right way. Are you advertising in the right place? Who is seeing your ads? Are these people the best customers for you? You cannot emphasise enough that marketing is a lot more than advertising or selling. It’s about providing a fulfilling customer experience thru delivery of promise, which involves putting systems in place so that customers get a consistent, high quality experience giving the customer enough reasons to come back.