Usually, after a while, a marketing campaign becomes less and less effective.
When that’s been going on long enough to clearly establish a trend, it becomes essential to DO SOMETHING before it really crashes and seriously affects sales.
Unfortunately the first tendency is often to decide that the market is saturated. Meaning that everyone has heard of your product and everyone who would buy it, already is buying or has bought it.
It’s almost never true. In fact, in my years in marketing and the business world, I’ve never yet seen it true.
So what could be going on?
1. Maybe your campaign has run so long that people turn it off mentally. They see the ad or the commercial start to run and they go, “oh yeah, that.” Time to develop new ads.
2. Perhaps the consuming public has shifted. Maybe what was the chief appeal which worked for years is no longer what’s chief in their mind. They care less and less about how much it costs and more and more about how fast you answer the phone. A good survey will find out.
3. Maybe competition has gotten energetic and is stealing market share. It is always wise to pay attention to what your competition is up to. Sometimes they get clever.
4. Sometimes the marketing channel you are using goes out of fashion. One company’s buying public wasn’t reading industry magazines any more. So of course magazine ads were working less and less well.
This has been happening with the Yellow Pages over the last few years, in almost every type of business. Again, a survey will find it out.
There can be other explanations. The point is that “The Market is Saturated” isn’t an explanation. It’s an excuse. So when you see your marketing being less and less effective – poorer and poorer ROI (Return on Investment) – the first thing to do is NOT to decide what is happening.
The first thing to do is LOOK. Investigate. Research. Survey.
Find Out.
THEN you can act intelligently.