In reality this is a perfect situation but when things get busy and client work starts coming through they often get left by the wayside in favour for billable hours. So why do many marketing plans fail?
Rely on word of mouth
A lot of firms that I talk to and have worked with, really rely on word of mouth marketing. They don’t think they need to do anything more than this. Have a couple of coffees and drinks with people you know and done hopefully a referral in the pipeline at some point in the future.
However, your marketing plan might not be making the most of other opportunities available to your firm to help create brand awareness. Have you looked into other options such as video marketing, social media channels or talking to your clients via email marketing? They may be more general marketing activities but actually when you piece them altogether, they make up a powerful way of increasing people both knowing and hearing about you.
Haven’t evaluated what is and isn’t working
Another reason your plan might not be working is you haven’t actually spent some time out reviewing how your last plan worked for you and whether it created any ROI. I’ve been there in my corporate marketing years. It can sometimes feel like a churn one year over what will we do next. Sometimes in some firms that I worked in you do the same thing pretty much every year. This is the wrong approach by far and you do need to spend some time working out where your clients came from last year and what channels before you put time, effort and budget into something that might not work.
You’re not prepared to put any budget in
As much as people hate the word – sometimes you do need to put aside some marketing budget. Some firms that I work with want to do things for free as much as possible and that’s fine but it will only get you so far. Your plan could be failing because you simply aren’t prepared to pay for marketing activity that could help propel your firm. What happens if you were to pay for a PR consultant to help you reach your press targets or a PPC specialist to help with your Google Adwords? Marketing can be all about testing and tweaking and sometimes you have to put some budget towards doing something different and seeing how it works.
Rushing in and not thinking things through
Finally, one other reason that your marketing plans might fail is because your firm has just rushed in. Sometimes you panic and doing something rather than nothing feels like the best bet. But not having any persistence or consistency in your marketing or really thinking things through will just work against you in the end. Doing something and not understanding why you’re doing it will just mean going around and around on the hamster wheel. Taking time to write a plan, have it place and then making marketing decisions in line with that plan will just give more structure to your activity.
