Is Your Marketing Toxic?

Most people think that the purpose of marketing is to sell stuff.  

I hear this frequently from clients who load up their emails and face book content with offers to buy their “stuff”. 

Whether it is bowling, hardware, admission tickets to an entertainment venue, automobiles, auto parts, restaurant meals or computer chips, it happens all the time.

So I ask a lot of questions of my clients; here is just a sample.

Why do you create content that only talks about you and not about your customer?

Why do you use so many registration forms in front of your content; don't you think that discourages people to read further?

Why do you use social media to promote products that very few people want?

Why do you send so many emails to your list as response rates drop and op outs become the norm?

Why do you create little teasers in your blog or newsletter and force the customer to  click to read more which results in, you guessed it, a sales pitch?

The answer I always get is: “Fred, we are in the business of selling stuff. We have to show real results or get real leads or because the Boss told me to do it.”  “We just can’t keep giving stuff away.”

I get it. I know about those pressures.

I also I know that there is a time and a place to us registration forms, a time to place coupons in your email and a time to send a selling email. 

But at what cost?

Bad content and only talking about yourself is simply the biggest mistake of 21^st century marketing.

Don’t take my word for it. Test it. Send some of your paid search to a blog site, and then measure it if they share it.  

Measure the effect of that traffic and the benefits of free traffic and then convert those to leads

Have a great call to action with great content that “Provides Real Information “and “optimize it”. 

Don’t use the registration “gate”; let the content become the lead generation machine for your business.

Because you need to realize that the PURPOSE OF YOUR BUSINESS IS TO SERVE CUSTOMERS and when you stop offending customers and prospects with constant sales messages, your business WILL begin to get many sales. 

Because serving customers, sells.