We all get in ruts. We regularly order the same menu item at our favorite restaurant, even though there are interesting specials we’d like to try. We go to the same vacation spot each year, even though it’s become ever more dumpy. We use the same lawn care company to tend our lawn, despite the fact the cleanup crew sometimes forgets to clean up.
In other words, we often have trouble straying from our comfort zones.
The same holds true in Dynamics marketing. We keep running a variation of a display ad that has pulled well in a particular trade magazine, despite the fact the ad brings in ever fewer inquiries. Or we continue exhibiting at a particular trade show, even though booth traffic, and resulting sales leads, have fallen off considerably over the years.
While there’s nothing inherently bad about staying in your comfort zone in your personal life, it’s become an increasingly dangerous proposition in your Dynamics marketing life. While you are forever focusing most of your company’s marketing resources on re-designing and upgrading your company’s web site, your competitors are busy taking advantage of the burgeoning assortment of new online marketing tools. There are new industry information and content sites, endless streams of new blogs to advertise on, search-engine-optimization tools, social media options, and on and on. Perhaps more important, your customers and prospects are becoming ever more adventuresome as well, exploring the new online information and content vehicles where your competitors are hanging out.
Often we stay with the once-successful marketing approaches even after their effectiveness has declined because we are intimidated by all the new options in this online age, when nearly every day there are new marketing options that seem to emerge in the online world. Or we pick out one or two online options, and just stay with them—for example, obsessing on search-engine-optimization techniques to bring more traffic to our company’s web site. There’s no problem with that, except when it is to the exclusion of testing the opportunities afforded by the emerging opportunities.
The big challenge with all the new options is that it’s easier than ever to screw up. Not all industry blogs pull the viewers we are targeting, and many of the list rental options are out-and-out scams.
At the same time, certain new online options offer huge opportunities to connect with Dynamics target markets. How do you distinguish between the blind alleys and the real opportunities? In Part 2, I’ll provide four ways to escape your marketing rut. For now, let’s just say that being in a rut is dangerous to your marketing health, while testing out the many new Dynamics marketing options hold out opportunities for cost-effectively finding new sources of customer prospects.
