Why you are struggling with your marketing

_You haven’t clarified your value message: 
What you sell, who you sell to and what is unique about how you do what you do – your differentiation over your competition.

You haven’t identified your target audience: 
Who has the exact need your product or service fulfills?

You haven’t figured out where to find your target audience: 
Growing your own marketing list of prospects is ideal (and there are all sorts of tools to help, like the Internet and social media), but also consider purchasing a list within your target market to help jump start your marketing in the right direction with a collection of folks you can market to within your target.

You don’t make time to do the work: 
You can’t just start a business and hope clients come, you have to actively put yourself in a position to showcase your unique value to those who have the need your products or services fulfill – if you have a system to consistently do this you have an advantage over your competition.

Nothing you’ve tried generates enough leads or the right kind of leads:
First ask yourself if you’ve done everything on this list up to this point successfully?  If yes, then you likely aren’t consistent in your marketing strategy.  If no, well you need all of the above and a consistent approach that fits your business for your marketing to work well. 

Once everything is in place you need to make working your plan consistently a daily, weekly, monthly habit taking note of what's working and not. You do have to give your consistent efforts time to develop and work for you -- how long is something you have to determine, but you'll get a good sense of when it's working.

You have too much fear of the unknown:
You fear you don’t know how to take advantage of the latest social media tools; you fear you don’t have enough money for a ‘good’ marketing strategy or to learn about marketing in general; you fear having to give a hard sell to someone to make a sale; you fear failure and the unknowns of tomorrow.

…these are excuses that hold you back from taking action and making progress, even very small bits of progress, in the right direction.  Acknowledge these fears and then move directly toward them and eventually through them vs. going around.  If you go around, you will run into them again, then you'll go around them again and again run into them.  If you move toward your fears and through them you will move past them and free up your mind for more important thoughts.

What you can do:
You have a choice to make things work or not.  If you want to have successful marketing for the health of your business you can get clear on the above and figure out how to build a marketing strategy that fits your business or not -- either choice has its challenges and will likely take a lot of work, but only one choice offers the success I think you're looking for.

Posted by:  Nick Venturella

schedule a free marketing coaching consult