Why Can Your Marketing Seem So Fickle?

Most of us recognize that it’s important to market our product, service or brand. Of course, marketing is not always something that you partake in voluntarily. It might be that for a silly (but relevant when hypothetical) reason, you feel that it’s appropriate to spend absolutely nothing of your budget on marketing services this year. However, if you’ve delivered your product well and have curated happy clients or customers, or if you have a review page, or if you’re simply a presence worth talking about – marketing is taking place all the time.

It comes as word of mouth, or reviews, or even affiliate referrals. For this reason, marketing isn’t always something so easy to pin down and direct, but it’s important that in large strokes, we seek to do exactly that. Well then, if it’s so easy to get to grips with marketing, why does it seem so fickle? Why is it that one campaign might work well, while another struggles to make ground? How can we boost our engagement without being exploitative? In this article, we’ll discuss a range of marketing principles that may help you more readily explore how to become efficient in marketing – and how to avoid spinning your wheels.

You Don’t Understand Your Audience

It might be that you don’t quite understand your audience. Now, this is nowhere near an insult leveled against you as an owner or your business marketing team. People change quickly, and it’s hard to put them into groups. It might be that your audience, while broken down demographically, share little with one another. It could be that finding an idealized version of who buys your products can simply leave you looking for someone that may not really be there.

Of course, it may also be that by typecasting an ideal customer, you’re somewhat insulting them. This is often the case when marketers do their best to promote fitness products. For instance, it might be that all the branded marketing material surrounding a fitness product showcases the ideal physical form of the person who may use it – not realizing that by resting too hard on the ideal, they’re ignoring those who may never look like that, ultimately disenfranchising their buyers later on. There’s nothing wrong with promoting a lifestyle (in fact, that’s the basis of engaging marketing), but understanding, if that’s even an ideal lifestyle for the users you’re trying to target, is another question entirely. 

You’re Hyper-focused On A Singular Audience

It might also be that hyper-focusing on a singular audience is leaving many people out. Rhianna, for instance, has been praised for her Fenty make-up line, as instead of selling her beauty products to women who only have a singular skin color, she made sure that women of color from all across the skin tone spectrum had something for them, and that they were prominently featured in her marketing.

This can not only inspire consumer confidence but it goes to show that she wasn’t willing to pigeonhole her consumers. You don’t need to shrug your shoulders and suggest that hollow inclusivity is being used as a marketing ploy here, especially when it has real, actionable results. By refusing to pigeonhole she opened the door to those who may love her products, and she also did so by not only marketing her makeup line to women. It’s not hard to see the marketing genius and even relevance in that.

You’re Ignoring Greater Societal & Industry Trends

Businesses operate in a society, of course, and while they influence it, they should also be influenced by it. It might be that by ignoring greater societal and industry trends, you’re relegating yourself to the past. For instance, even 4×4 utility vehicle manufacturers are now looking into the future of electric cars and how this might work.

Even Jaguar has been developing simulated hypercars to test the future of their products, allowing customers to grapple with their ideas first-hand. If you ignore greater societal and industry trends, they will move you, and that can make it seem as though your marketing results are hard to calculate in advance.

You Haven’t Changed And Neither Has Your Marketing

If you haven’t changed, it’s hard to force your marketing to do so. It’s important to ask yourself, ‘are we interesting?’ As a business is can be hard to say ‘no,’ but it’s worth asking yourself if people are already aware of what you do and how much you take that for granted.

Look at Coca Cola, for example. It’s one of the most recognizable beverage brands in the world, and yet it always makes a mainline effort to renew its marketing each year, no matter if that comes in the form of new and experimental flavors, drink bottles that have our names on them, new logo designs, competitions they run, sponsorships they promote, or Christmas advertisements they spend millions on. 

You may not have this kind of budget, but it goes to show that if one of the most stable and familiar brands on the planet continually does its best to seem new and capable (and more importantly, relevant), then it could be that your brand is. It’s not enough to market your brand, you have to prove why you’re working marketing in the first place.

It’s also important to directly focus on marketing specialized for you and your industry. Using a service familiar with online marketing in real estate can be a massive helper, for instance.

You’re Not Investing Enough

It may just be that you’re not investing enough in your marketing. Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re not putting enough towards your marketing budget. It may simply be that you’re trying to get overly cheap agencies to perform the job for you, and they’re not doing a great job.

More importantly, though, you may not be putting in enough hours. Having a staff member curate your social media feed and posting to make use of the algorithm, for instance, can be a big helper in how public and present your firm seems to be. Marketing should be considered as if it were pushing a large boulder up a steep hill – the moment you let go, the more all of your prior work can become undone. Knowing this can keep you disciplined, even if you’ve already banked some goodwill in your local community.

Now that you know why some marketing seem so fickle and have these strategies, you can take control of your messaging and implement something with impact.