Why Marketing Tactics Can Harm Your Business

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Choosing the right marketing tactics to action can be tricky.

After all there are just so many to select from.

When you choose the tactics and action them, you are after a result which ultimately is sales of your products or services.

If you choose the wrong marketing tactics then you will not get the sales you want and need for your business to grow.

Continue using them and the results will not look pretty.

The one thing to understand is that not all marketing tactics are equal. It doesn’t matter how much they are talked or written about, some will just not be right for your customers or products or services.

Some are effective if you want to create awareness, others if you want customers to buy more frequently etc.  The aim is to action the right ones to support your marketing strategy and achieve the marketing and sales objectives.

Let’s look at an example

You have decided that to achieve certain sales in the next six months you will concentrate on your current customers. In particular you want them to buy your products or services more frequently, from twice to three times.

You have decided your marketing strategy is to focus on service delivery and in particular personalised customer service.

All this good thinking and decision making can be brought down if you choose to action the wrong marketing tactics.  In this example the wrong marketing tactics to choose would be giving away samples or free stuff that your current customers already buy as they are more suited to attracting potential customers.

The question is how can choosing marketing tactics be made easier?

There are many ways but one that I have used is based on a process of asking two questions:

Why use?

This is the reason you have decided to select the marketing tactics. For example you may decide to do a cross sell promotion involving a couple of your products or services. The reason you decided to use this is because you want to expand your business with certain customers and increase the amount they spend when buying.

I should also say that some marketing tactics can be used in a number of ways for example a newsletter and then it is a case of how you implement them.

When to use?

This has to do with the timing of actioning the marketing tactics. Some marketing tactics of course can occur throughout the year such as a newsletter. Others will be used specifically at a certain time to boost sales such as seasonal products.

For example you may have noticed more promotion of specific gift baskets over the last few weeks for Mothers’ Day. The reason for this is to gain extra sales of these gift baskets during this period that would not occur at other times throughout the year.

The timing could also be related to what you are doing with your products or services. For example you would use certain marketing tactics when launching versus when you are just maintaining the sales of them.

Asking these questions do help to select the right marketing tactics to action.

How do you choose which tactics to use? Do you another method we can learn from?