Marketing Mix

A common problem business owners make – especially when they start working on their marketing and find (sometimes to their surprise, and always to their delight) this stuff works – is they tend to latch onto the thing with the best results and use it almost to the exclusion of all else.

We quickly become comfortable with what’s working now and see no reason to change. Familiarity with marketing breeds contempt for the market.

And not only does this cost you money because you’re missing out on a lot of untapped potential, but it’s actually very dangerous to your business.

Here’s why:

Things Change

What worked well yesterday might not be working quite as well today. You might be aware of it, and you might not. And even if you are, because of the way we’re wired, we tend to assume the marketing is still “working” and the problems lie elsewhere.

This is a dangerous tendency and one having a rich marketing mix can ameliorate because if we have lots of different marketing channels, then their comparative results are easily tracked and measured – meaning if one stops pulling its weight, then it quickly sticks out like a sore thumb.

Everyone’s different – including your customers and clients.

And one consequence of this is some people will respond to, say, email, whereas others might not respond until they actually hear your message in an audio file, or a CD sent to them in the post, or even personally from you on the phone.

Yet others might not respond to your offers until they see a video of you on a web page. The point is, your marketing mix must include all these different media so you stand a better chance of hitting as many people as possible in their “sweet spot”.

Almost everyone these days is using the Internet to the exclusion of all else.

And while I am a great fan of Internet marketing and think it ought to be the core marketing strategy for many businesses, the fact is it’s becoming more and more crowded – which means it’s harder and harder for your marketing to stand out.

By adding different media to your marketing mix, you can get yourself seen by your target market without having to jostle with your competitors for attention at the same time.

It’s dangerous.

Imagine if you found your best marketing strategy was cold-calling and so you never did anything else. And then one day you wake up to find it’s now illegal.

What would you do then? Or say you market yourself using well-crafted Search Engine Optimisation… and then for some reason Google changes the way they index sites and yours has vanished off the listings? Or – worse – somehow your SEO expert has made a mistake and you’ve got your site blacklisted and you’re up the creek with no paddle, no website traffic and no customers!

Conclusion

So there are just 4 reasons why your marketing mix is so important. There are more, but those are 4 of the main ones.

So take my advice and make sure you have a proper marketing mix and are not too reliant on just one medium or approach.

Take a look around the rest of this site, and get into some of the specific marketing strategies you can put to work for you right now and have them making money for you by tomorrow!

Written by Chris Cardell of Cardell Media