What to Do If Your Marketing Efforts Are Falling Short

Marketing is an imperative expense for any successful business. You could have the best, most affordable, highest performing product of its type on the entire planet and still not make a single sale. People need constant reminders. You need to stay visible.

Are You Ready To Change Your Marketing Approach?

The real secret to marketing success lies in understanding understand these things about human beings:

•    People have innate triggers they will respond to – Just as most animals will fiercely protect their young and some animals will migrate during set seasons and travel to set places, people are also preprogrammed in many ways. When marketing campaigns trigger the right programming cues, people will respond.

•    People act on emotions – Marketing campaigns that are designed to elicit certain emotions or desires can enjoy huge success. When people believe a product will help them look like the people in the commercials, enjoy the same level of happiness displayed on a screen or have the same level of appeal to the opposite sex, they will make purchases.

•    People respond to symbols – The language of symbols is one that has been used by people for eons. When marketing campaigns use the right symbols to elicit trust, desire or emotions, consumers tend to respond by opening their wallets.

What Motivates People To Buy?

There are a number of things that can motivate people to gravitate toward one product over another. These same things can convince people to purchase an item even if it is not truly the best or it doesn’t even offer the best value for the money.

When people make purchases they are generally influenced by these things:

•    True needs – People buy products and services to fulfill real needs for food, shelter, clothing and so on.

•    Perceived needs – Some products appeal to people by targeting their perceived needs. They make them believe they cannot get by without X product in their homes or offices.

•    Pure wants and desires – Consumers are also highly motivated by products that appeal to their personal desires. When product A offers value and quality but product B speaks to a deep desire, chances are it is product B that will sell.

From the product packaging all the way up to the “persona” of the company that created it, skillful marketing campaigns will sell more than the item in question. They will sell consumers on an image, a lifestyle or even a dream.

Just as authors use symbols to drive their stories forward, marketers can also use them to motivate sales, build trust and even turn average products into top sellers. When the right symbols are used on products, on packaging or in advertising campaigns, they can say more than words.

Influence And Action Go Together

It’s important to convince them that the object of focus is something they truly need or can benefit from rather than just want. When the bonds of textbook marketing are broken, amazing results can be had.

From the company’s image right down to the point of purchase advertising, everything must click with the consumer. Marketing efforts that really resonate with consumers tend to reach them in ways that are seemingly subtle, but very powerful nonetheless.

They reach out and connect with people on a subconscious level, motivating them to act with their spending money.

While advertising campaigns that are purely informational can show decent results, they generally will not produce record-breaking numbers. This is often due to the fact that campaigns of this nature fail to actually motivate people to take action.

Truly successful marketing efforts tap into hidden motivating forces and use them to guide people to take action. The best of the best know how to manipulate the unseen to get people to move forward and fulfill their desires.

Motivating forces can be powerful marketing tools for a number of reasons. They include:

•    Their ability to call people to action – When marketing taps into motivating forces, people will receive and respond to a call for action. Selling people on the idea that a product or service would make a good purchase is not enough. People have to be motivated to actually take action and make the purchase.

•    Their ability to appeal to desires – People are highly motivated by fulfilling their own desires beyond rudimentary needs. When they are motivated to believe products or services will meet their desires, they will respond accordingly. Tapping into different desires with marketing campaigns takes understanding a few well-kept secrets, but once they are employed the sky can be the limit on sales.

•    Their ability to touch people on an emotional level – Humans are nothing if not emotional. Some of the most successful marketing campaigns in history have tapped into the emotional side of human beings to get them to take a particular action or purchase a specific product.

•    Their ability to influence – People have to be influenced to make the purchase of a particular product over another. When motivating forces are used in marketing, consumers will often feel compelled to give a particular purchase a try or they might be influenced to keep buying the “tried and tested” even if something else has appeared on the aisle that looks just as good, but does not cost as much.

The Reasons Why Average Marketing Campaigns Fail

Even the best of standard marketing campaigns fail to attract the attention desired because they often do not:

•    Take a holistic approach – Marketing a single product is often not enough to really sell it. Even if the campaign is solid, it can fall short if the company is not included in the mix. Some of the best-known marketing efforts nationally and even internationally are far reaching in nature. They promote not only a particular product, but also a company and even a way of life. Image and people’s perception of that image are everything in successful marketing. Successful products and their makers are synonymous by design, not chance.

•    Take chances – Many marketing campaigns are designed to play it safe.

•    Reach out on multiple levels – Safe marketing campaigns will often sell a product solely on its merits. Advertisements and commercials speak to the features and appeal to consumers’ logic. These campaigns can and do sell, but they are not likely to produce huge results. To really enjoy success, marketing efforts must reach out to people on levels that go beyond logic and reason. Appealing to people’s emotions, the things that influence them and even the symbols they trust and recognize can make all the difference in the world.

Chances are your marketing strategies are sound, but not spectacular. If you’re doing what you learned in school or are just following tried and tested practices you learned in the field, you are likely only appealing to consumers from a single angle. Rather than really reaching them and compelling them to act, you’re just nudging them in the right direction. This can be effective, but it will fall short of helping drive products or services to the very top.

The world’s best marketers know how to sell not only products, but also emotions and even lifestyles. Great campaigns not only sell products, they also sell emotions, speak to people on a subconscious level and even compel them to buy using the techniques of influence.

People are motivated by a host of unseen forces, dreams and desires. When campaigns are multipronged and hit upon a number of these motivators, consumers tend to respond better.

Influence And Sales Will Come

To use influence to one’s advantage, it takes reaching beyond the norm in marketing practices and connecting with people on a deeper, often more meaningful level. When marketing campaigns sell an image, a lifestyle or a feeling, they tend to get more noticed.

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