Often, attempting your own marketing can have terrible results. Here are a couple of ways you can do more harm than good.
Doing it yourself when you don’t know what you’re doing.
Before Christmas I received a mailing from a local spa. It was black and white, on thin white computer paper. It screamed “cheap, do it yourself, this is not luxurious.” These are hardly the associations you want to make with a spa. Yet worse than this was that there was absolutely no contact information provided, not a phone number, Web site, address, not even a town name. I had no idea which spa in my broad area, this was. The owners did not make it easy to respond to their mailing. What a complete waste of time and money. I have heard a rumour that this spa has since gone out of business.
Refusing or neglecting to follow your own marketing strategy.
If you have approved a marketing consultant’s strategy to raise your profile in public, you can only sabotage your efforts if you stray from the plan. It’s never a good idea to 1) keep changing your company name, 2) refuse to use the company slogan or 3) create a new slogan that’s not being used in any advertising. Marketing, promotion and advertising is all about getting prospective customers to recognize and think well of you. Too much change in your basic identity is not good for markets that value consistency and quality. Not using strategic tactics is almost as bad as wild creativity that produces new directions at whim. Trust the experts that you’ve hired, and make a commitment to follow their strategy for about a year. It can take time to see any results of marketing. Giving up too soon can mean missing opportunities that were about to come your way if you had only stuck to the plan.