1. Bad Marketing doesn’t care about its target audience.

You are basically slapped in the face with hundreds, if not thousands of marketing tactics every day. Social media, television, radio, newspaper, door-to-door, MLM…the list can go on forever. Every one of those marketing pieces was developed by a person or team who desperately wants you to become a customer. Bad marketing throws a blanket over you and millions of other people in hopes that a few of you will connect with their message and decide to buy a product. It’s not personal, it’s not meaningful, and there’s a slim chance that the conversion rate will ever hit the target. By not caring about the target audience, you’re not only wasting money on a plan that will fail, but you’re not providing a great experience to your potential customers, and they notice!

2. Bad Marketing doesn’t get the results you want.

Every business owner wants their business to succeed. You want to sell your products, have many happy customers who return again and again, and gain lots of word-of-mouth buzz. In the attempt to “sell, sell, sell”, we sometimes forget that we’re selling to humans who have real emotions, real problems, and real feelings. They’re not robots who will click BUY just because our product is cute and sells for a decent price. Bad marketing throws an image of a product at a random person, hoping they’ll bite. Great marketing knows what the customer is looking for before they even come to your store. Great marketing targets the right customer for your business with specific criteria, then sticks with them until the purchase process is complete.

3. Bad Marketing looks…bad.

A healthy marketing budget is one of the most often overlooked pieces of a business plan. It’s fun to get excited about what you’re going to sell, and to envision the day-to-day atmosphere of your storefront, but how will people know what you offer?

Many small businesses approach marketing as an afterthought. Having spent all of the money on products, decor, or one of a million other things, the marketing budget typically gets the scraps. Did you know that a good graphic designer these days can charge anywhere from $50-100 per hour for their services? Yeah! Sounds like a major expense if you haven’t prepared for it in advance. My advice, spend the money to properly market your business. Get the good photos, get great advertising pieces, have the video shot professionally, and for cripe’s sake – hire someone to manage your social media pages. Bad marketing looks bad because it doesn’t have the money for a glow-up. And you cannot afford to go out looking like that. Build a budget that has plenty of room for great marketing. If you need help with that, schedule a consultation with Red Massive and we’ll help you figure out what a proper budget looks like for you.

4. Bad Marketing sticks to you forever.

You’ve probably heard that once something is uploaded to the internet, it’s always on the inernet. This isn’t just a story for moms to scare their daughters with – it’s true. In the case of this discussion, it doesn’t necessarily refer to risque photos (although it’s something to be mindful of for anyone). Your digital marketing efforts will be archived forever in some form on the internet. If you’re not consistently producing quality content, and instead choosing sub-par content, you’re flooding the web with incorrectly formatted representations of your business.

Outside of that whole “perpetuity of the internet” speech, people will remember what you show them. When I was an early teen, there was a commercial that ran on evening television advertising a furniture store in a local town. The close of the commercial was a 4-year-old kid saying, “…in Downtown Jacksonville!” and it’s stuck with me ever since. I had the opportunity to meet the owners recently, and I asked about this specific memory. The kid’s now-adult sister said that’s the number one thing people ask her at the store. Everyone who comes in has seen the “…in Downtown Jacksonville!” commercial.

They haven’t ran an ad in over 15 years. That’s great marketing.