How balanced is your marketing compared with your sales? Do you market your brand in the extremes? If you do, you could be doing great harm to your brand.

There are two extreme positions in sales that reflect badly on marketing. Position #1: Overselling and under-delivering on the promises you made while convincing your customers to buy from you. We have all experienced a product or service where the hype was more than the performance. When that happens, the reputation of your brand takes a hit. A bad name is a hard thing to shake. It was American author Mark Twain who said, "Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.” How do you keep your marketing from crossing the line and promising too much out of your brand? You need to figure out two key pieces of information before you write your marketing campaign. First, what are the features, benefits and advantages of your product or service? Where does your brand shine? Second, find out where your brand beats the competition. How are you doing things better than they are (and likewise, where are they better than you)? Make a script from these two lists and build your marketing story around it. By doing so, you will steer clear of overselling issues.

As bad as overselling can be, position #2 is just as bad: Underselling and over-performing – when you don’t put much into marketing, but give the customer more than what they wanted. Why is that a marketing problem? You exceeded the customer’s expectations! Here is the problem: you are keeping a problem-solving solution a secret. People will not buy from you if they don’t know who you are, what you do, and, most importantly, how good you really are at what you do. It is the job of marketing to effectively tell the story of your brand. That goes beyond a catchy tagline and a good looking web site, it is the entire reputation of what you produce, how you go about producing it, how you treat your customers in the process, how you solve problems for them, etc. Effective marketing tells the customer how good you are before the sale. If you can back it up, you will have the perfect balance of hype and performance.

One other thing: good marketing does not let a satisfied customer just go home without leveraging their experience to gain more customers. Think of your marketing beyond just making people aware of what you do. It should also be used as a platform for satisfied customers to tell about their experience with you. Star ratings on social media do this. So do testimonials. But so does a simple customer satisfaction survey. If you ask them, most satisfied customers will help you build your brand’s reputation.

Does your marketing oversell your products? Do you undersell your brand? Either extreme is bad for marketing. Find your balance between the two extremes.