The Business Blame Game

Hey Jessentrepreneurs

I've already spoken about how marketing is a rubbish occupation, most people see it as a waste of money. The idea behind it is that one day you'll have enough customers who only want to use your service and you can turn off the marketing and fire the team or agency and bask in your genius as you sit on your total addressable market and just having piles of cash flowing into your business.

Why marketing rubs people the wrong way is because it can be a change agent, smaller businesses, smarter businesses can use it to take a piece of your market share and the less you complete the more the competition cannibalises attention and eventually sales.

Image source: - cartoonstock.com/

Who is to blame?

Modern marketing relies heavily on digital channels and each traffic channel has its own pros and cons. the way I see it you have the following channels to drive traffic to your business

• Organic Search
• Paid Search
• Direct (Brand + Dark Social)
• Referral traffic
• Organic Social Media
• Paid Social Media
• Content marketing & blogging
• Influencer marketing
• Affiliate marketing
• CRM
• App and mobile marketing
• Email marketing

Each channel also has its own level of cost per lead and a level at which it becomes a viable source of the traffic to reach an acceptable ROI. What a lot of business do is try to jump into every channel from the get-go and find out later that not going deep on a single one makes the return on all of them pretty shallow and they begin to cut down. Depending on your team or marketing agency they will have a bias to a certain channel.

What gets to me however is once you move down the process of elimination and you're down to 1 or 2 channels to bring you traffic and you continue to blame marketing. Sure there is always room for improvement but marketing is not a silver bullet.

IF all else fails

As I can attest to, clients and bosses will beat marketing until the traffic increases and when it does, they conversions need to increase and you will beat them till they leave and find someone else to beat. No business wants to accept that they don't have a product-market fit or that they offer a shit product, or they wouldn't be in business.

But this is exactly why many businesses fail, instead of taking a look at their offering they look externally. Its the marketing, its the economy, its the customer, its the competition, but its never your product or service.

I think that businesses that are critical of their product are the best ones to work for, they're open to change, open to trying new things, open to criticisms, less likely to be stuck in the dogma and these are the businesses that eventually remain once the dust settles.

So what I'm saying is, if the signs point to your product not offering value, perhaps its time to take a second look at your offering.

Have your say

What do you good people of steem think? Do you think upward mobility exists? Do you think the rich can still fail at a venture and risk becoming poor?

So have at it my Jessies! If you don't have something to comment, comment "I am a Jessie."

Let's connect

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