Neglecting marketing is either seeing marketing as a waste of time and money or not executing an effective marketing strategy!
The first is a vision problem, whereas not executing an effective marketing strategy is more about operational marketing.
Lisa Nirell’s CMO Foundations: Become an Effective CMO training on LinkedIn further explains this issue.
Even C-level executives in organisations such as CEOs, CFOs, CIOs might approach marketing as ineffective!
In reality, though, neglecting marketing is one of the worst business mistakes that cause business failure.
But don’t worry, we have got a quick fix here: 6 Mistakes Most Businesses Make & How To Avoid Them!
Now, let’s go through what happens when you fail to execute an effective marketing strategy!
4 Consequences of Not Executing an Effective Marketing Strategy
To understand marketing, it’s a great approach to look at the word itself! There is a product or service that we wish to place in the market! That’s exactly where marketing is!
So marketing is much more than acquiring new users. You would know this if you ever heard of the 4Ps of marketing: product, price, promotion, place.
Great products are always born when marketers are actively involved starting from the product!
Some might also mistake advertising with marketing. If that were the case and we were here to explain the problems caused by the lack of promotion, that would have been more fortunate.
However, neglecting the marketing and not executing an effective marketing strategy is a much bigger problem so let’s take a closer look.
1- Lack of Product Competitiveness
If you laser-focus your marketing on a product like Apple, you would probably never lose competitiveness.
Because it’s not “there is a great product so let’s do marketing”! Instead, “let’s do marketing to find out what would be the exceptional product”!
It’s not like let’s give marketing a chair in the product team; it’s the other way around.
If you involve marketing in your product development, you will have a product that you can actually sell at the end.
If you neglect marketing, you could end up having a brilliant product that has no market!
2- Brand Related Issues
One other commonality is the brilliant businesses that fail to become a brand. This usually happens when marketing is neglected in a perfectly operational business.
When marketing is the weakest link, the businesses fail to deliver their core messages, but more importantly, it becomes impossible for them to become a brand.
What does this mean?
Marketers give businesses some identity, allowing target groups to recall the brand when needed!
If there is no brand, selling products or services often becomes very expensive because potential buyers won’t remember businesses right away.
They will start from scratch and search for a product or service instead of searching for you with your brand name!
3- Revenue Growth Problems
Most of the time, buyers go through stages before buying products, often referred to as the buyer’s journey. We could also call this a marketing or a sales funnel.
First, potential buyers go through the awareness stage, consideration, and finally, decision stage. But to be honest, they don’t move to the next step just by themselves.
This is where marketing once again gets critical. As marketers, we address all these stages with different tools such as content marketing, paid social, conversational marketing or PPC.
When marketing is neglected, there is no systematic effort to drive revenue and scale a business. We have to create revenue streams for a healthy business and somehow estimate the growth!
4- Difficulty Attracting Talents
If you are a huge believer in culture, as we are, you already know how critical it is to attract top talents and keep them in a business.
But how’s that related to marketing? As you probably know, the workforce is also described as internal customers.
If a company is neglecting marketing, automatically, it’s missing out on external customers and internal ones. It’s that simple.
Most people, especially Gen Z, desire to work at companies with a strong culture. Where do they find it? Only in solid brands!
As we already mentioned, it’s impossible to build a strong brand when you neglect the marketing and do not execute an effective marketing strategy.
We underlined four crucial reasons not to neglect marketing here, but it’s not very hard to come up with even more!
Marketing is a core business function for growth and if you are thinking of neglecting it, think again!
Besides, we are only a phone call away for a free consultation, so why not do it right?
