I was talking to him about the limitations that companies have and about the difficulty of impacting not only the entire audience, but a representative percentage of it. With the added problem that in order to convince them of our proposal we need to impact each one of them several times.
I was suggesting to him that brands need to become magnets for their customers in order to reverse the trend of chasing customers in order to attract them, and I came up with an initial approach to explain it better that might help you understand it better too.
One of the ideas I raised in my uk telegram number previous article was (and the central idea I was trying to explain to my client):
Our brands must become magnets for their customers, as they do not have the necessary budget to carry out sufficient advertising pressure for these campaigns to be truly visible and effective. Or they are in a niche market where it is difficult to find their audience in an effective way.
Why the vast majority of companies will never have enough marketing budget?
One of the basic steps in both the definition and implementation of a marketing strategy is the quantification of the audience we are targeting, in order to estimate the results and see whether or not the proposed strategy would be able to achieve the defined objectives.
If you do this exercise you will find two typical scenarios (which of course vary depending on the market, product, etc. etc.):
B2C : these are usually much broader target audiences, in highly competitive markets (where message repetition must be greater), and we find that in order to impact the percentage needed to achieve the expected results, we must invest an amount that the company does not have.
B2B : In this case, we usually rely on sector-specific media and events where we can make segmented communications, but with limited reach and effectiveness. That is why we need to impact this audience through more general media. And here we again encounter the difficulty of correctly segmenting and identifying them without wasting budget.
In short, in neither case do we have the capacity and/or budget necessary to impact our audience (remember that the context is that of SMEs, not large companies. Here budgets are limited, and in many cases very limited).
As a result, we find companies that are not clear about how to take advantage of marketing, with partial marketing strategies, frustrated because they do not obtain the results they expected (especially frequent in digital marketing), adapting the business discourse to the technical requirements of marketing (instead of marketing being at the service of the business),…
And if I can't impact my audience, how am I going to achieve the company's objectives? How can I make marketing bring real value to the business?
I think what I have just explained describes the situation of most companies. They know they have to do marketing, they know they have to take advantage of the digital channel, but they do it in a disorganized way and without clear results.
To achieve this, companies must start by looking in the mirror and thinking about things from the ground up. They must reconnect with their reason for being first, and with the market later (I recommend that you first understand what Ikigai is) .
To achieve this, they need to start with two things: the brand purpose and the business and marketing strategy that will help them reconnect with the market and, as a result, achieve their business objectives.
In this way, in addition to guiding marketing activity, we manage to give it meaning within the company. We will no longer have the doubts that most company managers have. They will be clear about the purpose of each action and the expected results.
As a result, we will begin to see how customers approach the company and we will not depend as much on marketing budgets to capture their attention.