Ad hoc or occasional marketing, without a proper strategy, is doing your business more harm than good. Here’s why.
In a perfect world your business would have huge amounts of cash, limitless time, and a crack team of marketing professionals relentlessly strategising and rolling out award-winning campaigns that deliver huge bottom-line results.
In reality, you don’t have much of a marketing budget and it’s really not that difficult to run a Facebook ad here and there – you do what you can, and really, something is better than nothing, right?
Actually, wrong. Very wrong.
Ad hoc or occasional marketing, without investing in a marketing strategy that takes in a complex marketing mix, timings, and messaging, is really doing your business more harm than good.
The negative effects of ad hoc marketing
An effective marketing campaign requires messaging that is tight, targeted and sends potential leads right down that marketing funnel, which includes the buying stages of awareness, research, consideration, purchase, and retention.
Ad hoc marketing can lead to inconsistent branding and messaging and make your company seem disorganised – or worse, contradictory and uninformed.
One common ad hoc marketing mistake is when companies think they have to promote every single item in the store. If they’re a hardware chain, for example, they might promote their DIY range in one post, run an ad for the garden centre in the local paper, then do an Instagram Story on the line of homewares they just got in.
They use different colours – because people love colours, right? – as well as different styles of music, and entirely different looks and feels.
Yet, when consumers are asked, they don’t realise it’s the same store, and even if they do, they struggle to articulate what the store is and how it can help them. A confused or annoyed person is no longer a potential customer – and probably never will be.
In marketing, you rarely get a second chance. If you’ve frustrated or confused a customer with ad hoc marketing, it requires a specific marketing strategy to get them back into the sales funnel.
And if you think a marketing strategy is too expensive, think about the price tag attached to reputation or brand rehabilitation. Not only has the ad hoc marketing been totally ineffective, it has cost your business more and has taken a whole heap of extra time.
Crucially, random or ad hoc marketing provides no learnings or information to inform future campaigns. Without measurable results tied to specific asks, how are you going to develop future marketing campaigns? What this means is that you’re destined to make the same costly mistakes again.
The importance of a marketing strategy
Put simply, a professionally created marketing strategy will create the pathway to achieving your goals and objectives. It will take in market knowledge, strategic timings, and targeted messaging that will intersect across multiple platforms.
It will use a strong marketing mix, including digital and traditional elements, targeting leads from different angles and touch points, at the same time building your brand, and cementing it as the ideal business to resolve their issue.
It’s important to remember that your relationship with your customers begins before they set foot in the door. How your marketing responds to their needs, and delivers the answers they’re looking for, is laying the foundations of your relationship and future interactions. It needs to be clear, thorough, and a seamless transition through the decision-making and purchasing phases.
The value of having a marketing strategy ultimately allows you to strengthen your brand, while saving your business time and money by focusing the resources only on marketing plans that support business objectives.
Importantly, your marketing strategy should never be mistaken for inflexibility. Constant evaluation is still essential – it should be calculated and form part of an overall business, marketing, and branding strategy to ensure your business reaps the rewards.
Speak to the marketing experts at Assemblo
A marketing strategy isn’t a luxury – it’s an investment that pays for itself in time and cost, builds a strong and recognisable brand, and feeds into every marketing activity in the future.
Assemblo is a full-service marketing agency based in Melbourne and we develop marketing strategies for businesses large and small, established or just starting out.
If you want help developing a successful marketing strategy, give us a call on (03) 9079 2555 or drop us a note via the contact form below.