Who’s Fault Is It When Your Marketing Doesn’t Work?
You Might Not Like The Answer.
By Rich Harshaw
My wife’s biggest pet peeve is losing things. (Stick with me for a second, and I’ll show you how this relates to marketing for contractors.)
More specifically, she hates it when other people lose things. In a thousand ways, she’s the nicest, sweetest person you’d ever want to meet. But if you can’t find a shoe, forget it. She’s got no sympathy for you.
Which is how I got in the crosshairs when her second set of car keys came up missing sometime around February or March last year. Since the keys were gone, and since she never loses anything, logic would dictate I must’ve been the one who lost them.
Then, every couple months, when she couldn’t quickly locate her main set of keys, she’d remind me how I’d been so lackadaisical in key-keeping. How could I be trusted with important things—like our six children—when I couldn’t even be trusted to keep track of a lousy set of spare keys?
So imagine my delight last Saturday when she came into the kitchen with a sheepish little grin on her face and admitted she’d found the lost keys—in one of HER jacket pockets while cleaning out the coat closet. Frankly, I was shocked; I had naturally assumed that if the keys ever did turn up and if it were her fault, she’d just toss them in the trash rather than admit she was the culprit. Bonus points to the wife for confessing.
The point is simple. When something goes wrong, our egos’ first defense is to blame somebody or something else for the failure. The same is true in business and in marketing. When something goes wrong, the tendency is to BLAME… and nine times out of ten, we tend to blame the WRONG thing.
With that in mind, I present to you, in no particular order, the top ten things you might WRONGLY blame for some of the most common general and roofing contractor marketing failures.
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