Summary: Your Marketing Sucks

Review and Analysis of Stevens' Book

BusinessNews Publishing

• Publisher: Must Read Summaries
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9782511022146
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sales
• Index: Business

The must-read summary of Mark Stevens' book: `Your Marketing Sucks`.

This complete summary of the ideas from Mark Stevens' book `Your Marketing Sucks` shows how marketers need to be aware of how many sales are being generated by their marketing campaigns. In his book, the author tackles the eight common myths of marketing and reveals the truth behind what makes marketing effective. Stevens also proposes ten rules of 'Extreme Marketing' that focus on the most important thing - making sales.

Added-value of this summary:
• Save time
• Understand key concepts
• Expand your marketing skills

To learn more, read `Your Marketing Sucks` and find out what you should really be doing with your marketing and why you should stay focused on making sales.

Summary of Your Marketing Sucks (Mark Stevens)

1. Always calculate your ROI

The essence of Extreme Marketing is that you never spend anything on marketing until you know:

1. Your strategic context – why you are advertising.
2. The most effective way to market your product.
3. How much business you’ll generate for each $1 spent.

In many businesses large or small, marketing is carried out on an ad hoc basis with little thought being given to a long-term plan. This is often because:

• At small companies, nobody has enough expertise to know how to market effectively.
• At larger companies, no one has a genuine vested interest in the effectiveness of the firm’s overall marketing. There’s nobody who will be fired if the marketing turns out to be spectacularly useless.

What’s needed are extreme marketers – people who are prepared and willing to be judged on the results they generate. Extreme marketers are competent in both marketing strategy and marketing tactics:

Marketing Strategy

• Extreme marketers create alignment between the marketing initiatives and what the company is doing to grow the business.
• Extreme marketers search for and articulate a USP – unique selling proposition. They know a business can only ever attempt to stand for one thing if it is to avoid confusion.
• Extreme marketers know the best way to reach the broadest possible audience as cost effectively as possible.
• Extreme marketers understand the importance of structuring an offer which will be compelling and alluring to the right people.

Marketing Tactics

• Extreme marketers can describe what they are selling in a single sentence.
• Extreme marketers become very good at differentiating their product from those offered by competitors – so much so, in fact, that buying from anyone else would be a dumb move.
• Extreme marketers always take the time to determine the best prospects so that less time is wasted trying to sell people who can never buy.
• Extreme marketers develop systems to monitor and track the efficiency of all marketing programs.
• Extreme marketers also excel at putting in place referral systems – and actually follow up on the leads generated rather than allowing them to fall through the cracks.
• Extreme marketers are good at cross-selling their products and services.
• Extreme marketers build momentum so the business will move forward steadily and predictably.

The challenge, therefore, is not simply to learn what it takes to become an extreme marketer, but to put these principles into action. Only then will your business start to realize its true potential. Extreme Marketing is all about the application of effective marketing practices.

2. Focus on growing your business

Marketing is not about seeing how much money you can spend. Instead, it’s all about growing your business and generating profits. Therefore, be skeptical – keep whichever marketing programs generate a return and consciously eliminate everything else.

When it comes to marketing, smart people often do dumb things. They get so carried away with seeing a nice brochure or a glitzy TV ad that they don’t stop to ask whether this is genuinely building the business. Therefore, to check that your marketing isn’t costing more than it generates, stop and ask yourself a few simple questions:

• Do sales rise when you advertise and fall when you stop advertising?
• If so, why don’t you advertise every day? Or advertise in more media vehicles?
• What kind of cost benefit analysis have you done on your marketing?
• Do people actually read your brochures and how did you reach that conclusion?
• How many people visit your Web site and how many of those people actually went on to buy from you?

There are seven main reasons why the marketing programs of too many companies are ineffective:

1. Nobody in the company really understands that marketing is judged by the number of sales it produces rather than how nice the brochure or TV commercial is.
2. Everyone just accepts the prevailing business generalities (like marketing by e-mail doesn’t work) as gospel truths rather than testing them for themselves.
3. They rely on just one form of marketing to generate all their sales year-in and year-out.
4. They clone the marketing campaigns used by their peer group companies rather than trying to do something innovative and original.
5. They ignore available resources like databases which would allow them to pinpoint potential customers in great detail. Instead, they try to sell anyone and everyone.
6. The corporate managers do not make anyone specifically accountable for generating a measurabl...

Table of contents

• Title page
• Book Presentation
• Summary of Your Marketing Sucks (Mark Stevens)
• About the Summary Publisher
• Copyright