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Many manufacturers and other B2B companies start off each year with a solid Marketing Plan to grow their revenue and profits, but many get off track and make 3 very costly mistakes that can be financially disastrous. Take a minute to look at these and see if your company is still on track or if you need help.
Here are they are:
1. Developing Tactics Without Developing a Strategy First---There are a lot of tactics involved in creating an effective marketing program, including email marketing, your website, social media, content creation, calls-to-action, SEO are all important tactics. Picking and choosing a few tactics isn’t going to lead to results. Strategy is understanding who the target is, what message you want them to hear, what are your goals, what tactics can help you achieve those goals and more. If you fail to develop, implement and follow through on a clearly-defined strategy, then you are wasting your time and the tactics won’t matter.
2. Failure To Completely Understand Your Buyer Personas---All successful marketing plans have one thing in common—they include well-defined and well-understood buyer personas. What are their challenges? What keeps them up at night? What experience do they have with your product or service? Companies must spend the time doing this research. Buyer personas will change. Their priorities will shift based on outside factors. Review your personas and their journey at least quarterly so you adjust your marketing appropriately.
3. Putting an Inexperienced Team in Charge---Marketing has changed dramatically in recent years. You may think your traditional marketing team can take on something like Inbound Marketing. You think they should have the skill set, but that is where some companies can go wrong. Inbound marketing is complicated. There are a lot of critical pieces must come together properly or you will have terrible results that could cost your company a lot of money.
If your company has gone off track with its marketing and made one of these costly mistakes, then this is where I believe Maverick Marketing does our best work. We work with many manufacturing and B2B companies to see what is working with their marketing, and most importantly, what is no longer working so we can refine their marketing to make it more effective. The results have been phenomenal for these companies. They have increased sales, higher ROI and their bottom-line profits have grown significantly.