Articles

We’ve got good news and bad news when it comes to customer reviews. The good news is that they’re important — 89 percent of customers read reviews before making a purchase, so positive reviews can be a huge boon to your business and your ability to recruit new customers. The bad news is that reviews aren’t always positive.

Marketing is the lifeblood of your business, but it’s not foolproof. If you’re not keeping close track of your strategy, your execution, and your results, you’re just pouring money down the drain. If you’ve been spending on marketing and not seeing results, here are a few things that might be going wrong.

Every brand has a mission. Some call it a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Some just call it a “why.” Whatever you call it, there’s more to your brand than just turning a profit. There’s a reason that your company needed to exist rather than all the other companies that work in your space.

We know that marketing is basically the most important department in any company — of course, we’re marketers, so we’re not the most impartial group to be weighing in. In fact, marketing is often seen as a luxury by executives trying to shave a few extra dollars off their operating budgets, and that’s a mistake.

There’s too much marketing in the world for anyone to pay attention to it all. We say this as marketers who are regularly putting more messaging out there, so we know it’s true. But that doesn’t mean that you’re wasting your time trying to get your brand’s message across — it just means you’ll have to find another way to stand out.

Lots of people claim they hate marketing or advertising. They think it’s obtrusive, annoying, or deceptive. We know that that’s not true — what people hate is bad marketing. It’s just like music, really. There’s music out there that speaks from the heart and says something valuable about the world, and there’s music that’s pandering to a fanbase to make a quick buck. You want to be playing the former.

It’s an unfortunate fact of life that a lot of businesses fail. 21 percent of businesses don’t make it past their third year, and a full half don’t last five. The ones that do last can credit their success to a number of factors.

Yeah, we know. Audio? Didn’t that die out when we all started carrying the internet around in our pockets? In a sense, you’re not wrong — nothing makes us close a tab faster than an autoplaying video with sound — but that doesn’t mean there’s no place for audio in the world of B2B marketing.