Two Common Marketing Mistakes That Virtually 90% of Businesses Make

If you have been in business any length of time, chances are at sometime in the past you’ve done some advertising or marketing for your business and it doesn’t matter if it was yesterday, last week, last month or last year. If you have ever done any advertising at all, I can virtually guarantee that you’ve been making at least 1 of the following 2 common marketing mistakes. And, it doesn’t matter if you’ve been doing business for 1, 5, 15, 25 years or more, and have been getting what most people would consider decent results—I’m here to tell you that these 2 mistakes have cost you a lot of money in lost opportunity and lost business. 

And I’m not exaggerating here to catch your attention. In fact, I want you to go get some of your marketing material right now—be it a newspaper or magazine ad, web content, an online ad, a brochure, a radio script, a TV ad, whatever it is—go get it right now and then evaluate it for yourself as I describe these 2 mistakes. I want you to objectively judge your own marketing and advertising and make a determination for yourself whether or not what I’m saying has value.

Got em? If not, definitely do this later. You can always watch this video or read this page again. But don’t just blow it off because what I’m about to share with you can literally change the course of your business for the better instantly.

So what are the 3 banned phrases? Well, there is really only one phrase, but we have three evaluations to test if they are phrases that use platitudes. In marketing, platitudes are essentially the Knockout punch. Let me give you the definition of a platitude as it pertains to marketing. Platitudes are “words or phrases that are drearily dull, obvious, or predictable and lack any power to create interest because they are overused and unoriginal, yet are nevertheless still commonly used as though they were unique or powerful.”

Let me give you some examples of platitudes. They are words and phrases such as, “Highest Quality, Best Service, Largest Selection, We get the job done right the first time, 50 years of experience, Honest, Dependable, Call in the Strong Arm, Number one, Your dealer of choice, State-of-the-art, Experts in, Specializing in, been in business since 700 B.C. and all that other blah, blah, blah.” Sound familiar? Of course it does. You’ve heard this kind of monotony for years. But now here’s the crucial question, do you have these terms in your marketing? I bet you do. I don’t even know you, but if I were a betting man, I’d bet the ranch on the fact that your advertising and marketing is loaded with platitudes just like these right now. Go ahead and take a look for yourself.

I want to share three evaluations with you that you can use right now to test whether or not your existing marketing material has platitudes in it or not. Okay, here we go.

Platitude Evaluation #1 is called “WELL, I WOULD HOPE SO.”

When you boldly state a claim, don’t think about it in the terms of how it makes you feel proud. Of course it feels good to say that you offer higher quality or faster results or something like that. Rather, I want you to think about it from the prospect’s point of view. Then, you’ll realize how ridiculous most platitudinous claims sound.

When you say something, ask yourself if your prospect will immediately think to themselves, “Well, I would hope so.” For example, as I looked at a couple of websites for roofing contractors, one says, “At XYZ Roofing no job is too big or too small. C’mon, Really? “Well, I would hope so.” You’re a professional roofing contractor for crying out loud.

Look at what this contractor puts on his website to convince his prospects to choose him out of the other 5,000 roofing companies in the area. XYZ has been built on being different. Attention to detail, expert craftsmanship, friendly professionalism. Honest, “friendly professionalism?” – I’m not quite sure what that means, but “I would certainly hope so.” Really, what do you think he is going to say? “We’re the same guys who did your taxes earlier in the year. We’re going to show up late. My crew will be exposing their backsides to your children when they bend over and your roof will still leak when we leave.” Of course not. It’s easier to simply say “been built on being different. Attention to detail, expert craftsmanship, friendly professionalism.” But, it’s a huge platitude. It’s drearily common. It doesn’t have any compelling language to evoke interest, it’s overused and repetitious, and it was apparently nevertheless stated as if it were original or had great meaning. You know what? Every single website on this search results page is chock full of nothing but platitudes.

Furthermore, I can virtually guarantee that all of your marketing materials are loaded down with all of these platitudes right now. However, to further illustrate, let’s move on to the second platitude evaluation.

Platitude Evaluation Number #2 is “WHO ELSE CAN SAY THAT?”

I’m not asking who else can do what you do but what other businesses can say what you say. And the truthful answer is almost always Anyone and Everyone.

To examine this closer, let me share with you one of the great illustrative stories that Rich Harshaw shared in his book. He tells a story of a time when he consulted for an automobile repair business that stood head and shoulders above all competitors in the auto repair industry in a particular local market. Their stellar claims included 11 mechanics — who were all ASE certified in all eight areas of specialization. They had twice as much top notch diagnostic machinery and equipment as any of the dealerships, and their floors were so sparkling clean you could eat off them. They turned around 95% of their repairs in under a day and they unconditionally guaranteed all repairs for 12 months.

Have you ever called a shop to checkup on the status of your vehicle? Instead of getting the runaround like you normally get at a dealership or a typical repair shop, the owner would patch you directly to the actual technician fixing your car via a wireless phone and he’d tell you personally how things were going.

They had a waiting room that included a playroom for the kids, free drinks and snacks, magazines that were always current (imagine that), and bathrooms that were cleaner than the ones that you may find in your house. Their capability and quality service was second to none, but, they had major marketing issues. Even though no one could come even close to performing – let alone out-performing their operation — at their top level, their advertising looked virtually identical to all their less competent competitors. The business’ website for instance — which is where a lot of their business was coming from — stated the same type of generalities and tired platitudes as everyone else. Foreign and domestic car service, ASE certified mechanics, and the typical long list of expected services offered — from brakes to AC service to transmission services and — get this – they accept Visa or MasterCard. Well, isn’t that amazing. NOT!

If you recall what I said a minute ago, then you’ll probably already realize that this falls into the “Well, I would hope so” evaluation, but next ask yourself this question. “Who else can say that?” Well, Rich asked the business owner and service manager the big obvious question, and the service manager started getting noticeably upset. He said, “There’s no one else that can even touch us. The dealerships bring their cars to us when they can’t fix them. Our mechanics are far and away the best in the state. Nobody, and I mean nobody, can say what we say. “

The guy was getting kind of bent out of shape about it. So, finally, to make his point in a civil way, Rich had them go to Google and search for “car repair” and look at all the other companies that show up and see for himself what competitors were claiming. Well, let’s just say that the owner’s jaw dropped for what seemed like a couple of minutes before he pointed at one of the sites and said to the service manager, “Look, I know this guy and he’s terrible, but his site says the exact same thing that ours does.”

In fact, he was sure they copied his site’s layout and exact copy. He looked at the page and saw that all the websites that were listed, as he clicked through almost everyone was virtually identical to his. There was no way to deny it, especially not while staring at the evidence.

Remember, it’s not what you can do. It’s who can say what you’re saying. Take a look for yourself. What are your competitors saying? If I were a betting man, I’d bet that they are saying virtually the same as what you’re saying. And this leads me right into evaluation #3.

Platitude Evaluation #3 is the “Scratch Out/Write-In Test”

Okay, so here’s the final quick platitude detection evaluation. Then, we need to move on. It’s called the SCRATCH OUT/WRITE IN TEST. So, look at your marketing materials — your website, your brochure, your direct mail campaign, your Yellow Page advertisement, and any other ads you have in play. What I want you to do is scratch out your name and write in the name of your fiercest competitor. If the ad is still fits, if no major changes would need to be made, then you just failed this test. Now here’s the eerie part: take your competitor’s ad and cross out their name and write in yours. Do this exercise after you watch this video, it can be quite revealing.

Well, I hope you got all of that, if not, you can simply watch this video or read this page again later. The idea to keep in mind is that platitudes are the #1 cause for abysmal returns on your advertising investment because everybody and I mean virtually EVERY business is using them. When you work with Strategic Marketing Consultants, we fix this problem for you. Remember, no other marketing agency around is going to fix this problem for you. Why? Because they are usually the source of the problem.

But here’s the bottom line, these platitudes that fill up your marketing and advertising are killing your profits and destroying your market opportunities. You see, these platitudes don’t distinguish or separate you in the marketplace. They don’t quantify or specify anything. They’re not believable, they’re usually not provable, and they cause your prospects to minimize, discount, disbelieve—or worst of all, ignore you altogether. Ultimately, your target market ends up believing that you and your business are just like everybody else in your industry. This is why your target market always ends up grinding you on price, regardless of how great you claim your “service” is or how much better you think you are than your competitors. None of that matters, because you have introduced yourself to the marketplace as one more scoop of chocolate in a whole sea of chocolate. Now I’m not saying there is anything wrong with chocolate, in fact I love chocolate, but what I am saying is that if you are perceived as being chocolate —just like everyone else, the only real message you are portraying to your target market is “me too.” Think about how pitiful that is. You see, this is why you are not dominating your market, and this is why your sales and revenues are dependent upon the force of the market and not your ability to win over more and more customers and dominate your industry. That’s a big difference.

This is absolutely the wrong approach to marketing, yet it is the most common approach in business today. Everybody is doing it, including you and your competitors. The good news (or bad news if you’re slow), is that the first one to fix this problem essentially – wins. Seriously.

Let me explain what fragmented marketing is and why it’s the wrong way to do it, in contrast to what we call “systematized marketing” which is the right way to do it. Fragmented marketing means that there is no cohesive message or comprehensive system handling your marketing for you. Instead, when you buy marketing and advertising, it is developed by the company creating the ad, right? Think back to the last advertisement or marketing piece that you created for your company. What was it—a TV commercial, a website, a printed ad, a radio spot? Let me ask you a question—who created the copy or content for you? They did, didn’t they? The radio station created your radio spot, the magazine created your magazine ad, the design company created your brochure, the web design company created the website, and the TV station developed the content for your TV commercial, right?

Think about how fragmented that makes your marketing efforts. All of those different companies have different ideas about what your marketing message should be – based on their limited experience. Inevitably, they all use platitudes and then try to throw in their own dose of creativity. Think about how wrong this is. You need to develop and own your own message, you shouldn’t leave it to others, and you certainly shouldn’t leave it to multiple teams of others who don’t really have your best interest in mind, nor do they care about your position in the marketplace.

This is why you need a marketing system in place. The system dictates the content of the advertisements, and it dictates the sequence that your prospects go through and the message that your prospects hear as they are ultimately led to your door. A systematized marketing program would actually facilitate the decision-making process—in other words it would define what criteria your prospect should look for in a company, product, or service, and in doing so, it would lead them to buy from you and not your competitors.

Here’s another question to illustrate this problem—take a look at your last advertisement (I know it’s filled with platitudes), but here’s the question—how much money did you pay to have the content of that advertisement strategically created and formulated to ensure outstanding results?  I’m not talking about the design; I’m referring to the content—the message—what you actually said in the advertisement—not what it looks like.  That’s what I thought—you paid nothing, right? 99.9% of the time, you only paid to have the advertisement produced or designed, or you paid for the spots or “airtime.” The content was usually just thrown together by the designer, the production team, or the salesperson! Think about it—the most important part of your marketing material—that is, the content and message—was put together for free by people who usually have no idea how to create good magnetic messaging anyway. And have you ever heard the saying, “you get what you pay for?” Well, I hate to tell you this, but if you’ve never paid anybody to create the actual message or content for your advertising campaigns, then you got what you paid for.

So here’s the point—when you think of marketing, you need to start thinking about your message. You need to think about what you’re going to say and how you’re going to say it. When you think of marketing—don’t think of mediums anymore—think of messaging. Only once you have the right message should you start considering which mediums to run your marketing in.

You see, this is the difference between a marketing system and typical fragmented marketing. A marketing system first considers the message. We first develop the message and install that message in a comprehensive marketing system which facilitates the prospects decision making process. Finally, we choose the best mediums to put those messages in to generate leads to pump into your sales funnel. Do you see how much more effective that is than typical fragmented marketing?

So now that you know the two most common marketing problems that businesses make, I’d like to invite you to learn how to solve these problems. At Strategic Marketing Consultants, we have put together a scientific marketing system, called the Strategic Marketing Program™ that effectively solves these problems and puts our customers on the path towards market dominance. The system is described in detail on our audio program entitled, Total Market Domination. This audio program is available exclusively from Strategic Marketing Consultants.

Additionally, you can contact our office today to request a FREE Marketing Leverage Analysis. This marketing leverage analysis is not just another lame sales call. On the contrary, we will take a look at your existing marketing materials, and we’ll objectively rate them using our own Marketing Content Scorecard. We will then review the results with you so you can see how much leverage there is available to you when you eliminate these common marketing problems and implement a marketing system based on the Strategic Marketing Program that is free from platitudes.

When we work with each of our clients, our goal is for them to become the #1 company in their industry and their market. Since there can only be ONE #1 company, we can only work with one business per industry and local market. Therefore, if one of your competitors happens to contact us first and qualifies to become a client, then we simply will not be able to work with you in the future. We feel ethically bound to honor our promise to help one company dominate their local market.

So it is up to you to decide, does what I have said make sense to you? Do you think these strategies could transform your business? Do you even want your competitors to know about this information, let alone implement these and more?

Thanks for reading and I look forward to seeing you if you are fortunate enough to be the first company in your industry and your local market to contact us.

What to do next?  Get your FREE copy of our Total Market Domination 4-CD Set.