Why copycat marketing can hurt your business!

Following on from yesterdays marketing tip, a number of readers have asked me the same question:

“Why do so many people do the same type of marketing, if it doesn’t work?”

Here’s the answer.  Amateur marketers will copy what they see others doing, wrongly assuming that it must be working.  This then gets more and more people repeating the same ineffective marketing, which encourages even more people to do the same, etc.  In other words, they copy what they see the crowd doing.

Marketing copycats and the wisdom of the crowd

I remember speaking with the owner of a hotel, who advertised for a year, paid in advance, in a local newspaper.  I asked him why he did this, as it was perhaps the worst possible place for him to advertise.  He told me that the local newspaper called him to say his largest competitor was advertising there and that the paper wanted to “give him the chance” to advertise there as well. So he did.

Of course, his advertisement didn’t generate a single piece of business.  Apparently, the biggest hotel in the area got their advertisement for free from the newspaper.  The ad sales guy at the paper then used that hotel’s ad, as a way to pressure other hotels in the area to buy advertising. Eventually they got 8  hotels to advertise, when none of them should have even considered it!  That’s the danger of copycat marketing.

Is your marketing on course?

Here’s a useful question to ask yourself:

Who (or what) encouraged you to use the various types of marketing that you use today?

You see, if you are not getting the marketing results you want, it’s entirely possible it’s because you are doing the wrong marketing activities, for what you want to achieve .  Just like that guy, who rows his boat in the wrong direction, no matter how hard he rows, he will never get where he wants to be; because he will still be heading nowhere.  In fact, the harder he rows in the wrong direction, the further away he will be from his destination. This is why so many hard-working business owners earn so little.

The bottom line here is this: If your marketing direction is wrong, you need to change course NOW!