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Marketing is like anything else—it becomes what you feed it.

Unfortunately, that means a steady diet of neglect, sub-par content, and dated design concepts will lead to something that isin a wordmonstrous.

This article is dedicated to those businesses and non-profits who have a marketing monster under their bed. When we come into their room and peel back the covers, here is what we often find:

Ghosts

Wispy and weak. After years of neglect and a focus on “the business,” marketing ghosts are what happen when your marketing has a soul, but no body. It’s barely there, some people have seen it, but most are convinced it doesn’t exist.

It looks like this: you do great work, you’re well-respected by your clients, but potential customers aren’t finding you because you aren’t putting yourself out there. It’s almost like you’ve decided to haunt the same house for 40 years and are hoping everyone stops by to see you. Maybe you exist, maybe you don’t, or maybe you just don’t think what you do is important enough for your audience to know about it—these are all things your potential customers are thinking.

Give Up the Ghost
Pull back the curtains and let the sun in. Get on social media with a video reel that highlights some recent success you’ve created for your audience. Motion content is a great way to show your audience exactly what partnering with you could look like. Seeing is believing!

Vampires

Handsome, but bloodsucking. Your marketing looks great, but your messaging makes your customer feel like your only goal is to drain their life (savings) and leave them just as cold as you are.

Slick, gimmicky, tricky, with an eye only on your bottom line, if you’ve got a marketing vampire on your hands you are bound to suffer when the sun rises and the Google reviews start piling in. You’re not communicating your process and value effectively and suddenly you become the bad guy you never intended to be.

The Wooden Stake
Get your messaging right. If you really care about your customer, teach them. Give more than you receive when it comes to valuable content your audience cares about. Use your marketing to answer their questions and provide a really clear picture of what they can expect from a partner who exists to make their life better.

Frankenstein

When you piece together your marketing with a bunch of misshapen and mismatched parts, and then zap it with your marketing budget, you end up with something that might scare away more customers than it brings in.

Frankensteins often happen early on or after many years in operation. Either you’re a start-up just trying to get all the pieces in place, or you’ve been doing this so long that you decide to add a couple of “new things” every couple of years. The result is a confused audience who isn’t quite sure what it is you want them to do (and is afraid to ask).

“Hi, I’m Frank. How can I help you today?”
Clarity and strategy are the keys to turning a Frankenstein back into a cohesive marketing plan. Start with a marketing audit to identify current gaps, and then follow that up with a comprehensive marketing plan that informs and drives everything you do when you communicate with your clients.

Robots

Cold. Calculated. Numerical. When the robot overlords take over your marketing, you know you’re doomed. Sure, they’re cheap and “highly automated” but whether you know it or not, you’re paying a price in the long term.

Clients who end up with this metallic monster meant well when they started down their marketing journey. Maybe you decided to pay less for smaller subscription models, or a network of freelancers that promised greater ROI on your dollars, but what you ended up with was a lot of automation without anyone who truly cared about your results.

Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto
We like software tools just as much as the next humanoid, but to achieve the marketing results you’re looking for, you need a guide, not a gizmo. Get a partner in your corner who can tell the gizmos what to do, and then you’ll have something that looks a lot more like Arnold Schwarzenegger and less like that tin can your competitors are running.

Think you’ve got a marketing monster we’ve never seen before?

Bring it on.
Book a free no-obligation Discovery Call today to tell us a little more about your marketing needs and how we can help. Whether you need a marketing audit, a marketing plan, or the deliverables to support all that you do, we’ve got the team that can make it happen.

Book a Discovery Call
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