5 CEO Marketing Misses

In marketing, it’s so easy to over-focus on activity, when isolated activities and random acts of marketing just don’t work. And one of the key reasons this happens is a lack of clear direction and purpose for the marketing effort or marketing team. Here are five things that CEOs often miss when it comes to their marketing.

Market Segment

First, without a specific target for your business, your marketing becomes watered down. It’s really important to take the time to decide specifically who it is that your business can help the most and focus your product and your marketing on that segment.

Mission

Secondly, knowing that target market is one thing; another miss is understanding your value for those particular people. You need to take the time to document and truly understand what it is that you’re doing for them. Without that, marketing tends to be inward-focused and talk about products and how great you are, and that’s the quickest way to turn off your prospects. They want to hear about how you can help them.

Message

Another miss is a message – a single unified story about that thing you do for that special group of people that your whole team can rally around, learn and understand so that your clients are hearing the same thing from every direction. Without that, marketing is inconsistent and gets tends to just cancel out.

Meaning

Another even higher level miss is meaning. Without a purpose that drives everyone on your team, Marketing can just go through the motions and do stuff rather than caring about your mission. And you know what? Prospects can tell. It’s not something that you can fake. So a CEO has the opportunity to help the team understand why what your business is doing is important and build that into everything that you do and everything that you say.

Mindset

And lastly, the most often missed thing from a CEO is the right mindset around marketing. Without a mindset that marketing is about helping your customers, not just selling to them or not just bringing in new customers or getting revenue. Without that mindset, you won’t attract your best customers, no matter how much you spend or how innovative your strategy is. A purposeful customer-focused mindset is rare.

If you invest time to make that happen, you have the opportunity to stand out in your market space and really make a difference, which is what your purpose should be.