How much does your organization invest in marketing?

Beyond thought leadership and inbound marketing strategies, there is advertising, promotional items, trade shows, CRM, marketing automation, the web and social media.  Any way you look at it, the investment is substantial.

Yet despite this focus, and despite all of this strategy, why is marketing so often ineffective?  Is there a factor that silently gnaws away at this investment, often hidden from obvious view?  The answer, unfortunately, is yes.

Marketing has but one goal:  to build the organization’s brand.  All else, from generating awareness to generating leads, flows from this.  (I am not suggesting that building the brand is the ONLY thing marketing does, but that everything that it does flows from it.)

Building the brand means building a trust experience.  It happens at every touchpoint: in person, over the phone, via email, advertising, traditional media, and on the web.  So while the marketing investment might be building the brand up, a particular person’s experience at a touchpoint might be tugging the brand down.

There are 1000’s of trust-killers, but here is a selection of some of the more obvious:

• Disappointing product or technical capabilities
• Not keeping your promises
• Poor service experiences
• Focus on what is best for your organization, vs what is best for the client
• Personal greediness and ego
• Social Media narcissism
• Forgetting key details – such as a contact’s name and their priorities
• Systems and people that assume a closer relationship, when it hasn’t been earned
• Lying, Cheating, Stealing

Does this topic resonate? Reach out to Randall: he can present it to your group.  (More presentation topics)
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