Your Marketing (probably) sucks
When I worked on the shop floor there was one thing that I always understood to be essential. When I was making my own sales and when I was leading the team it was something I always made sure was kept in clear focus. It kept customers happy and made sure the sales kept flowing.
Sell benefits, not features.
Most people don't care that a phone camera has 12mp, a Carl Zeiss lens and is ready to take pictures in half a second. What they care is that it will allow them to capture and keep those memories of their children that they would otherwise miss.
They don't care that a phone has 32gb memory and comes with Bluetooth headphones. They care that they can store plenty of music on it to improve their gym sessions and that the headphones won't get damaged through sweat.
If they have children and go to the gym anyway.
The key though is, that to show the benefits you have to know the person. There is no point selling a phone on its fast child-friendly photography or its great fitness motivation if the person is a single man who has never seen the inside of a gym.
What I realised though is that the same is true of lots of other things too, especially in marketing, but we don't seem to get it.
Lets say you are a job advertiser looking for recruits. Go find a job description and see what they say. Its always features.
"We need X skills of Y years"
and so on.
Maybe they list a benefit of pay, maybe they don't, and pay in most situations isn't a true benefit anyway.
These are not benefits to the person who is reading the ad. They are features the advertiser is looking for.
Imagine if you went to buy a mobile phone. You walk in and the first thing someone says to you is;
"you will have to pay £300 for it".
Then they tell you that the manufacturer wants you to give them your account access, track your movements and listen to everything you want to do online.
Are those benefits to you? Are you going to leap in and buy it? Of course not. You want to know what it will do for you, not for them. We all know these things happen, but we still buy because of the benefits.
Job adverts and job agencies are one of the worst for this and I see it all the time on LinkedIn. They want you to "buy" the advert, to pay with your time and your information, to get you signed up for their books.
But they have no clue about how to "sell" you the job. They tell you what they want, what the company they are working for wants and they assume that you can guess the possible benefits on your own.
This doesn't work.
We are in a great economic period. Companies are growing, jobs are plentiful. People are not as desperate to get jobs as they used to be so the tactics that used to work don't any more.
I say job agencies are one of the worst for this but they are not alone at all. Companies, frankly, seem lazy. Often things have been good the minimal effort they have used in the past has done them ok. But things are changing.
You can't have a product and run a single advert to a massive vague demographic any more. Adverts along the lines of ;
"here is our product, come buy it"
targeting everyone possible are reaching the end of their useful lives.
Instead companies need to look at micro-demographics. Detailed subsets of individuals who they can understand and talk to in the way they want to be talked to. Individuals who they can offer real benefits to.
That is where your marketing efforts need to be made in the modern digital world. TV advertising, radio advertising, newspaper advertising, single mass promoted social media adverts, all these things are wasting your money.
Large numbers of smaller highly targeted adverts done online are the way to get real ROI.
Modern companies, those new "exponential growth" companies which spring up from nowhere to dominate market, seemingly overnight, they understand this. Those are the companies who are taking your existing customers and soaking up all your new ones as well.
All because they understand the rule "benefits not features".