Are These 10 Marketing Mistakes Keeping You From Growing? (Marketing Series, Part 1)

We have a serious sales problem in this industry and it’s called marketing. 

Your biggest competitor today is not a competing promotional products distributor. 

Your biggest competitor is whatever occupies space in your clients’ cluttered minds. 

Marketing experts estimate that we’ve gone from being exposed to around 500 ads per day (in the ‘70s) to somewhere between 4,000 - 10,000 ad messages each day. 

You are not competing against one or two competitors, you are competing for attention, and your competition is everyone. 

Today’s marketing must consistently kick ass to be memorable. Those who are winning the mindshare battle, cut through the noise with sophisticated marketing strategies and creative tactics. Due to the overwhelming deluge of messages vying for a buyer’s mind, there has never been a more critical time to retool your marketing. 

The average promotional products distributor at best does marketing poorly, and at worst, little-to-no marketing at all. But those who excel at marketing in this industry command higher margins, maintain longer relationships with clients, and attract the best sales talent.

In this series, we’re going to focus on the essential strategies and tactics to revolutionize your marketing game. But, like a physician diagnosing an ailment, let’s diagnose the problem first so we can provide the solution. Here are the ten critical errors that keep you from growing.

1. No dedicated marketing focus. Marketing is a dedicated discipline, just like sales and accounting, and as such, requires the skill and focus of a professional. Even if you cannot afford to hire a full-time marketing professional now, a full-time focus is required by someone or by the combined energy of the people on your team. Marketing requires as much attention and forethought as sales.

2. You are unintentional with your marketing. The typical entrepreneur in this business has a strong sales focus and, because of a bootstrap mindset that still exists, the owner thinks they can handle the marketing, or, they relegate marketing to an entry-level person on their team who isn’t trained in marketing. Perhaps worst of all, they default “marketing” to their sales staff, which means marketing only becomes a focus when they have time, which is once or twice a quarter. No focus? No outcome.

3. You have no strategy, and you do marketing ad hoc. You buy some self-promos for holiday gifts or mail an occasional campaign, and you’ve fooled yourself that you’re implementing a strategy. If you have no strategy, you have a shot-gun approach to marketing-when-you-feel-like-it, and marketing on occasion is never going to make a permanent impression in your client’s busy mind. It has been well said, “if you don’t have a strategy, you’re a part of someone else’s strategy.” Did that clever self-promotion campaign you sent once or twice last year get shopped by your client to another distributor? You’re a part of someone else’s strategy. 

4. You mistake marketing for image and brand only. In this business marketing drives sales. Period. In fact, it will do your head a lot of good to think of marketing as “sales on steroids.” It’s even better than that; it’s scalable, measurable, and evergreen. If your sales team is busy taking care of clients and you have an ongoing marketing strategy with multiple tactics that trigger a customer to buy, that’s called sales, not marketing. Marketing is much more than image enhancement. Replace the word “marketing” with “sales” in your mind because marketing is sales.

5. You think of marketing as an expense rather than an investment. If you were to buy a piece of printing equipment to generate more production (ergo, more sales), you would consider the money you spent as a capital investment. Same with marketing. A thorough, ongoing marketing strategy is like a long-term asset: it’s building brand equity in your business. In fact, a solid marketing strategy is one of the reasons top sales talent will work for you and stay with you. Marketing is one of the most crucial investments you can make for a enduring brand.

6. Your marketing and your sales are not aligned. It’s a common mistake with most businesses to silo marketing and sales into two separate categories, so much so that sales and marketing work with blinders on, rather than in concert together. Align your marketing with your sales goals and you’ll reap the benefit of concentrated energy toward one single goal.

7. Not mapping marketing tactics to grow existing accounts. Everyone knows the superhighway to fast sales is through growing existing customers. But if you think of marketing as a new client acquisition tool only, you are leaving a lot of money on the table. There are so many ways to use marketing to grow sales with the clients who have earned your trust, from a consistent spec sample program to quarterly idea kits, community engagement, and much more. If you map marketing activities to existing clients first, you’ll reap a faster reward and begin to see that marketing truly is “sales on steroids.”

8. Your marketing is undifferentiated and ambiguous. What problems do you solve for your clients with the products you sell? And are you communicating those solutions through your marketing? You don’t sell new hire kits, you boost employee retention. You don’t sell apparel, you create brand champions. You don’t sell awards, you motivate people to achieve their highest ambitions. Does your marketing look like you’re shiling swag (just like everyone else!) or solving problems? Are you a “wandering generality or a meaningful specific?”

9. You invest in only one or two channels. You rebranded your website and you’ve built some cool self-promotion campaigns, but what about your social media plan? And your event marketing plan? What about a client referral program? A consistent email marketing program? Content marketing and SEO? And what about multimedia, podcasts and video? Since it takes 6-8 touch points to convert a prospect into a client, how are you going to convert more clients with only one or two channels?

10. Your image portrays your business as too small, or ineffective, to handle big clients. For distributors particularly, we work with clients who are much bigger than us, and in order to meet them on an equal playing field, we need to earn their respect by matching their sophistication and messaging, this can be done through marketing. Moreover, we are an industry that sells marketing products. Prove your marketing mettle to clients by being the best damn marketers they know, and they’ll trust you with their marketing.

There are more than 30,000 distributors and over 15,000 suppliers in this industry and the vast majority look the same.

In this series, we’ll help you step away from the herd and carve your own unique path to success. We’ll talk about the secrets to a powerful marketing strategy, marketing goals and how to set those within the context of your strategy, how much you should be spending on marketing, the most successful marketing tactics, which channels you should be using and how to maximize each channel, how to align a solid social media campaign with tactical marketing that delivers results, and so much more.

Make 2020 the year your marketing became an entire sales force.