Why Most Businesses Fail

Working in the world of custom websites and marketing has given me a particular perspective why so many new businesses and ventures do not succeed. To sum it up….lack of marketing.

Over the years I have talked to hundreds of business owners. They were all hard working, all cared very much about their products and their customers.

Even with all that, I still found that some of these business owners would be out of business months after we had talked about how well everything was going and how they really wanted to dive into some website work or marketing in the next quarter or the end of the year.

I was looking at the difference between those businesses I talk with that do well and those that struggle or end up closing.

This is what I found in businesses that were doing very well:

• They have a very clear understanding of who their target market is.
• They understand what is valuable to their target market and what problem they are solving for their clients.
• They have some sort of marketing or message worked out to communicate to their target market, telling them what problem they solve and what public they service.
• They express this message in their website, their emails, their sales communications with clients and any other communication they have with their public.
• They have worked out how to effectively contact new people within their target market and get them to see their website and messaging to turn them into prospects and customers.

The ones that struggle or end up closing have one or more of the following problems:

• They didn’t understand who their target market was. They expressed it as “everyone”
• They didn’t know why someone would choose them over their competitors, they just tried to get enough advertising so some people would sign up or call them.
• There was no clear message on the value of their service or company, just a message that people should buy their products.
• They were spending time and money “advertising” or reaching out but they didn’t know exactly how it worked, they weren’t tracking the results and didn’t really know what they had to do in order to generate new customers consistently.

None of the businesses I talked to that struggled had a bad product, they usually had good customer service and they genuinely cared about what they were doing. The problem was that no one else knew about it!

I’ve seen companies with a mediocre product dominate a local market and companies with a completely innovative and awesome product struggle and go out of business. The main difference was with their marketing.

Check out the above points and make sure you have all of them figured out for your business.

Know of any others you think are key for businesses trying to get launched or expand? I’d love to hear about them in the comments below!