As a business owner and entrepreneur, I happened to learn a lot during the course of setting up my business. One of the learning is when I am trying to market my brand. How do I want my brand to be perceived in the market and how to build the brand strategy that could be a foundation of any marketing or promotional tactics to the consumers? During the first few months when we are trying to setup our operations and develop our products, the marketing effort could be the least concern that we had. Only until we can justify our business model and getting ready to shift our focus into get more customers, then I realized that we didn’t have a proper brand strategy to be implemented. Then I was thinking to myself, how many of us who forgetting the foundation of the marketing itself and just go directly into big fat ideas about the whole marketing activities without any clear objectives. Let’s check if these things happen with your business as well!
1. Jump right into the action.
I always taught myself to use the inverted pyramid framework every time I want to work on things. It used to be called as an upside-down pyramid view in the organization. What more and utmost important has to be on top- in this case, the main objectives should be on the first base of every action that we decide to do. Many marketers jump right into the action without realizing what is the objectives on activities that they are doing. This is dangerous because it will have a chance to ruin your brand reputation if you didn’t play it correctly. Especially it might give a wrong statement about your brand which will affect your brand positioning in the market.
2. Not targeting the right audience
The basic common mistake that marketers do is not doing a targeted marketing or not targeting the right audience. Marketing is not only about advertisement. With advertisement you can potentially reach as many people as you can, but how many people is exactly your targeted customer? Even more, do you even know who is your audience supposed to be? Is your ads or communication or your marketing activities speak to your target audience?
3. Undefined positioning
You develop a great product, you have amazing teams, and you are ready to get your product out in the market. Now, how are you going to brand your product? What kind of thought that you want your customer think on the top of their mind about your product and your brand? Some people think that once they have a product, name of the brand, logo, color, then everything settled. It is not! You need a customer to choose your brand over your competitors. You need a customer to think of your brand when they are looking for the product that your brand has. You need your customer to love your brand. If you cannot define your brand positioning in the market, you will lose track on what your marketing objectives should be.
4. Not understanding the brand value
Brand value is not only a unique selling proposition. It is about what does a brand contribute to the revenue. Speaking of revenue, it is about understanding how people make choices, what does people do to get into a purchase decision of your product, and how does the brand affect that choices. During the process of understanding your brand value, you will identify the elements that attributes to the brand itself. It helps you to analyze what elements can strengthen the core of the brand that makes people choose you, believes in you, and think about you.
5. Forgetting the funnel
The most important aspect on marketing is to understand the customer journey starting when they didn’t know about your brand or products until they make a purchase decision and transform to a loyal customer. There are few options you can choose to understand your customer journey, starting from AIDA model or Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, Retention, Advocacy, or the new digital marketing funnel where you measure Pre-Purchase Stages and Post-Purchase Stages, or any kind of others customer journey model that you know. The idea is after you understand where your customer coming from and how you can get them to be your loyal customer, you will be able to create the funnel according to what your customer thinks and feel. The marketing funnel will help you to encourage your potential customer to take a next logical step in the relationship. It will also help you to take a step-by-step action for every stage in your customer journey so your marketing plans will not go for nothing.
There are many more missing steps that we as marketers might not take or choose not to take. The options are in our hand. These all 5 things are basic requirements to understand before we start any marketing activities and start spending money for something that we didn’t know will work effectively. The beauty of marketing is we can do many things creatively but has to be effective enough to bringing in revenue to our business. The challenge here is how to make our customer love the brand and willing to pay a price for our products. It is not easy and never been easy, but once you nailed it, you will have it.