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Focus Your Marketing On What You Do Well To Increase Sales While Avoiding the 500 Failure

Written by: Leanne Hoagland-Smith

Article Overview: Do you change your marketing activities in an effort to increase sales without realizing the impact of those changes? Read on to learn why you need to understand what you do well to avoid the 500 Failure.

Focus Your Marketing On What You Do Well To Increase Sales While Avoiding the 500 Failure

A solid marketing plan is necessary to increase sales. However, what I have learned is that many people stop doing what they do well specific to marketing when it has and continues to increase sales.

Several years ago, when Ford had the number one selling car, the Ford Taurus, in 1992-1996 and had established thousands of loyal customers, someone in management decided to change the name while changing the overall look of the car. The Ford 500 was botrn.

Loyal Ford Taurus customers were left out in the cold. Instead of building upon the existing loyal client base, a marketing decision was made to shift the loyal customers into an unknown product. In 2007, the new CEO of Ford saw that the name change was detrimental to the bottom line and returned the name of Taurus to the Ford Family for the 2008 model year.

How many times do you as a small business owner, executive or sales professional scrap what you are doing well to try another marketing strategy? Possibly, you spoke to a marketing agency that said what you were doing was not effective or too traditional or old-fashioned. For example, you have been doing direct mail campaigns and getting a 2% to 3% response rate. Now you switch to advertising in a radio, television, Internet or print vehicle. You have been sold a bill of goods based upon the impressions, but you now have no way to determine your conversions.

Another example is speaking at local civic organizations to professional associations. You discover that you get one client per delivered speech. Now you decide to abandon that marketing strategy and construct an Internet pay for click marketing campaign or direct mail campaign. The pay for click may take several months before you can determine how many conversions you receive.

When you have an effective marketing campaign that is delivering interested prospects and that you can easily track conversions, then your first action should be to continue that marketing campaign until it is no longer effective. Why in the world would you attempt to switch loyal and established customers in an effort to hope to increase sales? The more logical solution would be to attract more customers using the current product or service. Remember the old adage that success breeds success.

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Article Tags: ceo of ford, civic organizations, direct mail, effective marketing, ford 500, ford family, ford taurus, interested prospects, loyal client base, loyal customers, mail campaign, mail campaigns, marketing agency, marketing campaign, marketing plan, marketing strategy, radio television, selling car, small business owner, television internet



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