How to Up Your Marketing Response

Your marketing campaign should do multiple things: create awareness about your company and your product; build your brand image; and most importantly, it should bring in sales. If your marketing campaign isn’t prompting customers to take action, you may want to rethink your marketing techniques.

Here are six reasons that might be making your marketing campaign dead in the water when it comes to getting a response from customers:

1. Your ads aren’t presented in the right context. Nowadays it’s easy to reach prospects in the right place at the right time. For your marketing campaign to succeed, you must communicate your message when your target market is ready to receive it. This means placing full color brochures about your dental product in dentists’ waiting rooms, not at an auto shop. This means hanging up your advertising flyers for your new book in the library instead of the supermarket. Got the idea? You need to grab customers’ attention when they’re already likely to be thinking along the lines of your product or industry.

2. You don’t tout your benefits. Maybe you’ve already got your business brochures in the right place at the right time. Then what could be the problem? Check out your marketing message – do you just list features of your product? People don’t respond to features, they respond to benefits. Create a benefits-laden message in your brochure printing pieces, your advertising flyers, your television commercials – every piece of marketing material you have should clearly state your benefits to customers. Your benefits can be tangible (like saving money) or intangible (like feeling safe). Your benefits should also differentiate you from your competitors.

3. Your offer isn’t what people want. Sometimes when a marketing campaign fails, it’s not because the flyer printing company didn’t print the brightest hues or because your business brochures aren’t jazzy enough. It’s because your product or service lacks appeal. To make your product more appealing, try bundling it with other products that meet the wants or needs of your target market. Try testing different bundle combinations to find the one that people respond to most.

4. Your marketing materials are poor. Marketing materials are not an art project to give to your kid to create on your desktop printer. You should use experts – flyer printing or brochure printing companies, Web site designers, marketing copywriters, etc. – people that know good design and have access to the best materials. It takes experience to know what marketing tactics work and if you don’t have that experience, there’s no shame in paying someone that does.

5. Your marketing frequency is too low. People can’t respond to ads they never see. This is why you need to overestimate how many times you need to send out your full color brochures, your direct mail pieces or how many months you need that billboard to stay up. People remember things by repetition, so odds are your materials just aren’t reaching your audience enough.

6. You don’t make it easy to buy from you. If you send out a direct mail postcard to drum up some business, and people have to send in that postcard, then receive your catalog, then mail in the order form for the catalog, you’re going to lose people in that process. You need to eliminate steps and make it as easy as possible for customers to buy from you.

Another way you make it hard to buy from you is to not have enough salespeople around so when people go into your store, they have to wait. Not having enough employees is another barrier to people trying to buy from you – if no one answers your phone or if no one is available to answer questions in your store, customers will walk away and won’t come back.