The End Of Traditional Marketing

If you’ve ever worked with a traditional marketing company, you know what to expect…

1. Lots of questions about your target market
2. Lots of testing
3. Lots of “invoice creep” (where you keep getting billed for more and more incidentals)

Here’s what’s wrong with that…

1. You are NOT the best person to tell them about your target market! Although every traditional marketing company will tell you that you are, you most definitely are not. This is why so many marketing companies will blow through the budget, and afterwards, they’ll blame YOU and say that the information you gave them at the start was flawed.
2. Testing is great! But testing is a tool that should be used to fine-tune a proven marketing campaign. Companies who test, and test, and test – are learning on your dollar.
3. I’ve sat in on dozens of marketing meetings where traditional marketing companies try to explain the additional expenses on their bills. There’s a reason why the word “creep” means ‘to nudge up’ and at the same time describes a person who is taking advantage of you. Your numbers should be set at the start of the relationship, they should be clear and easy to understand, and they should NEVER be nudged up.

Many traditional marketing companies are basically teams of trial-and-error experts, which means they try all the different past marketing tactics that may have worked for other companies, instead of finding out what’s working best today, then locating your typical buyers and driving them back to either your storefront, or your phone number, or your website ready to buy.

True marketing is all about studying your target audience, then creating an appealing message about you, your company or your product… and knowing how to position that message in front typical buyers exactly when those potential buyers are either researching a solution to their problem or when they’re ready to buy.

The right marketing firm should ask you about your top 3+ competitors (the ones who are similar to you and who are growing quickly) because a few days of research can uncover exactly where those competitors are spending the majority of their marketing dollars, what they’re doing that’s working right now, and exactly what ads or media pieces they’re running.

If you own or run a company, you should be monitoring your competitors ads on a regular basis. And there’s dozens of ways to do that quickly and simply (for both online ads – like pay per click, pay per call, or online media buys… and offline ads – like radio, tv, or direct mail).

We use a custom built software to monitor competitors of our clients, but there are lots of tools you can use to get a glimpse to what the other side is doing, like:

• Google Alerts
• SpyFu
• Marketing Grader
• SEO Book
• Infinigraph
• SEM Rush
• Monitor Backlinks
• Compete

A little knowledge of your competition combined with real knowledge of your typical customers can be a game changer to any business of marketing campaign.