5 Factors That Contribute to the Success of Your Marketing (2024)

There are so many important ideas and concepts in marketing. Things like content, email, and pay per click advertising are integral to success, but none of it really matters without some key factors in place.

Today I want to focus on the 5 factors that contribute to the success of your marketing and talk a little about how you can do a few things to modify your marketing and get even more results.

You must narrowly define your customer instead of just going after anybody who has a business card. Ask yourself, who can you deliver the most value too. This is the group you’ll have the greatest impact on and can potentially bring in immediately.

Understanding your ideal customer is critical if you want their business. You need to understand their pain points, wants, and needs and be able to address those needs in your marketing efforts. Narrowly defining your customer is the most important thing as you look at growing your business.

I can say without hesitation that being better is a waste of time, being different is where the money and competitive advantage is at.

Creating a better service, product or organization is hard and temporary. It’s a lousy advantage that can be toppled tomorrow by a competitor with a lower price, more convenient location, shinier award, newer technology, fancier presentation, or bigger community.

What you should be doing is figuring out how you can simply be different from the competition.

In my opinion the best way to create the right differentiation that can’t be easily copied and stand out from the competition is to:

• interview your ideal customers for insight
• create your own special way to treat customers
• create an experience that’s unique
• create a totally new and convenient way for people to get a result

The next thing that contributes to the success of your marketing is your message of speaking to problems, before solutions. If you don’t take this seriously, everything else you do in term of marketing will be far less effective.

When you’re taking the time to address the problems your ideal customers see and feel before offering your solution, there is little chance the marketing activities you’re implementing to attract and convert them won’t resonate.

If you’re having a tough time thinking about your ideal client’s problems, think about the conversations you had leading up to your sales meeting, the things addressed in your client interview or hopefully, you’re a good note taker and can revisit those for some insight.

For example, a lot my firms prospective clients might say things like — I just want my phone to ring, I want to be on the first page of Google, I want more referrals, I want less marketing headaches, I want my website to generate leads, I feel like I’m wasting money on ineffective marketing, etc.

So my firm doesn’t sell strategic marketing or marketing plans or even consulting — all my ideal clients need to know about what we do is:

• We make the phone ring — end of story.
• We get you on the first page of Google — end of story.
• We make more referrals happen — end of story.
• We make marketing headaches go away — end of story.
• We make the website generate leads — end of story.
• We make marketing dollars go to work — end of story.

Another example, a massage practice: They might have the best tables, oils, and most highly skilled therapist but all their customers seem to care about is that their pain and discomfort go away.

So that’s the promise they need to communicate, shout about and promote. The rest is an expectation — I mean doesn’t everyone in the massage business have highly skilled therapist.

That’s it — that’s how you retarget your message so it’s no longer about you and your remarkable products and services and it’s all about your remarkable clients and the problems they want to be solved.

One of the dirty little secrets of marketing is that more great marketing has fallen short due to impatience on the part of the marketer than for any other reason.

Successful marketing takes strategic patience. It takes a while for prospects to become aware of you and then trust you enough to buy, and if you change your marketing, media, and identity, you’re hard to trust. Success comes to those who begin with a plan, and have the strategic patience to move beyond the need for instant results.

The reason great marketing is so powerful in the first place is that it doesn’t manipulate, it persuades — it’s useful and educational information, presented in an accessible, interesting way.

Discovering that takes strategic patience.

Your resourceful website might not do the job. Your aggressive LinkedIn participation might not deliver as well. But your website and social media participation, combined with your telephone follow-up, email newsletter, speaking, advertising, publicity, and patience get the job done very nicely.

It’s your strategic patience that wins the award for the profits generated by your marketing

Today your prospective clients conduct some form of research on products and services online, and that behavior shift decreases the need for you to simply provide information. Instead, they want someone who can now provide insight, shed light on problems, and in general be so resourceful that they can bring other world-class experts to the table.

In order to compete today, you must change the way in which you, your solution, and your organization are seen by prospective clients. To accomplish this, adopt the following one tip to be part of your strategy.

First and foremost you automatically change the context of how ideal clients view you, your organization and your solution when they find you as opposed the other way around. Today this is more about being found through educational content — and less about going out and hunting.

Start publishing and sharing useful content. You must find ways to get invited to speak in rooms filled with prospective clients, you must find ways to be found via search engines and you must find ways to be referred as an expert when people go searching for answers.

Your consistent participation on sites like Quora, LinkedIn, Facebook and industry specific sites can greatly aid in efforts to change the context of how ideal clients view what you do or what your solution does, and in effect render the competition irrelevant.

When you develop a reputation for being helpful, useful and relevant through publishing, and sharing information, then you get invited to places where you have the opportunity to sell.

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