Guaranteed Marketing Wins, Regardless Of Your Sales Funnel Health, or Line Of Business
Marketing, like fitness, can always be improved, regardless of the level you are currently at. We offer a mixture of cheap and expensive, low- and higher-hanging, improvements which – all things being equal – reliably deliver ROI-positive results.
Guaranteed Marketing Wins
| 1) Survey Your Current Customers And Understand For Certain Who They Are And What They Want | Get permission, compile email addresses from previous clients, and reach out to them to listen. This is an often-overlooked bit of advice. Many veteran executives and marketers intuitively know their customers, and therefore don’t see the benefit of gaining additional insights into who their customers are or what they want. But a thoughtful survey will almost always reveal a) new channels, b) additional product offerings that will result in increased revenue. The trick here is not to produce a generic or bland survey, leave it open for ideas, and to compile that data visually – generating profiles or personas. Attest, Remesh, or Hubspot Make My Persona can help you compile your customer profiles. |
| 2) Implement A CRM And Email Solution; If You Already Have One, Segment It And Delete Dead Contacts | You want repeat sales and continued engagement with people who already like you. A CRM enables you to scale contact with leads and customers. Email marketing doesn’t work the way many think it works. Drip marketing should be punishable by imprisonment for up to 5 years; as it stands, marketers who do it are largely marginally employed, or work for companies of ill repute. For proof, all you have to do is look at your own inclinations, when you receive an email you don’t want. You unsubscribe. So, you want to segment your CRM; you want to know where people came from and what they’re interested in. You never want to ‘shotgun’ newsletters or, generally, to speak about yourself. You want to reach out only with ‘awesome’ to offer. We recommend this article for CRM and email etiquette. Lastly, you want to delete people who don’t want to hear from you. |
| 3) ‘Keep The Lights On’ For Channels That Are Not Performing; Never Surrender A Channel | Even with the latest and greatest analytics, there are aspects of attribution that can’t be measured or quantified. In other words, there’s some impact that a channel you’re not seeing returns from. And you can’t measure it, for a variety of reasons. Consider that before you pull out of a channel entirely, unless the ROI or ROAS is/are abysmal, and the buy-in threshold is significant. Keep it, even if you are spending $5 a day. A small ad spend in one channel could be having an unseen impact on another, and surrendering is almost always less desirable than reducing spend to a trickle. Here’s a guide to marketing channels. |
| 4) Spend More Where You Have Positive ROI (Scale Away), But Watch For The ‘Plateau’ (Where Additional Spend Makes No Difference’), And Back off | If you’re running a positive ROI through any given channel, your costs are covered, so scale away. Spend more and get more – traffic, engagement, leads. That said, you want to get a sense of when reach and traffic and conversions plateau, and then back off. Your ROAS and ROI (your returns) are at this point yielding less as a function of ad spend. If you consider Y a point on a theoretical Y axis that represents the point at which no additional spend makes a difference, and you are getting asymptotic to that line, you want to get to the just before ‘reverse hockey stick’ point; not to where it levels off, near the line. The correlates to the just after an exponential growth curve, where you’re getting the most for your input. See the illustration below. |
| 5) Get Friendly With Google My Business, Google Shopping (eCommerce) Reviews, And AdWords | We aren’t talking about SEO, which – literally – is not promotion but optimization, or removing barriers to your visibility. SEO does nothing for acquired visibility or giving people a reason to come to your website. No, we are talking about Google My Business and AdWords. Which we all see and use daily, and which are almost always indispensable in a marketing plan. Reach out to your customers and request reviews; this applies as much to brick-and-mortar companies as it does an ecommerce business. Even if you are a software company, it won’t hurt to get company reviews. Why, because along with AdWords, GMB helps Google validate your web domain and help your organic search rank. Google isn’t supposed to favor you with your Search Engine Results Page (SERP) if you are spending money with them on AdWords, but they do. |
| 6 ) Make Your Website Beautiful And Useful | Whether fair or not, flash is cash. We make all manner of assumptions about the quality of the operations, the product, and the people who work at any given company based on superficial signals. So, fix your website. Make it easy to use, sensible, and nice-looking. |
| 7) Give People A Reason To Visit Your Site With Buyer- or Customer-Centric Content (Stop Talking About *You* And Talk About *Them*) | There are few exceptions to this rule. The returns are in: outbound (paid) marketing delivers 1/3 the leads at 3x the cost. Everything is about helping people and providing a reason for them to find you, rather than interrupting them to ask to take money from them, later. Ok – paid advertising still has its place, but paid performs best when coupled with offers of genuine, objective value, whether a lead or customer chooses to buy from you or not. There are a few verticals where the Buyer Journey and conversion cycle don’t warrant a big content push, but even then, adopting a default attitude of ‘How does my site help people?’ is always beneficial. Here are our New Rules Of Marketing. Nobody wants to come to your website to read you talking about yourself, just as you don’t want to open emails from companies and invest time reading them talking about themselves. People want help, solutions, respect, value. |
| 8) Develop A Sales Ladder | Russel Brunson and ClickFunnels notwithstanding, consumers want to be courted. They don’t like the full court press of funnels and a push to convert after just having met you. This is especially true with more expensive purchases. So, court them. Make them an initial offer they can’t refuse, that gives you diagnostic insight into how to better help them (not to ‘sell’ them). Here’s some information on ‘ladders‘. You don’t try to sell the $10,000 dental bridge first. You will fail. You offer free cleanings. Tons of people come into your clinic. And you get ‘diagnostic insight’ on how to help them. Then, you offer affordable cavity fills that you know firsthand they will need. Only then then do you offer the bridge or veneers. |
| 9) Get Wild To Get Attention | We can’t overstate this. 90% of most everything is perfunctory, boring and uninspired. It’s born of meetings and bureaucracies and committees and mediocre people, and, sadly, reflects humans who don’t enjoy what they do. Don’t be or do that. Get enthused. Delegate. Set some creators free. You don’t have to spend big to get a brand refresh or new creatives. You can get ad consultants. You can go to ‘gig sites like Toptal, Upwork, Guru, or Fiverr. We do recommend hiring domestic ad and brand consultants, unless a foreign portfolio is simply amazing, because creative work is all about nuance, and those unfamiliar with the Western markets (assuming you’re operating in the US or Europe) will have a more difficult time communicating those nuances. |
| 10) Brush Up On MBA Curriculum And Marketing Basics (Product, Placement, Pricing, Promotion) | So, your ‘marketing mix’ (or strategy) is your ‘Four P’s’. It’s an old term, but it covers a lot. 1) What you’re selling, 2) where you will sell it, 3) what you will charge, and 4) how you will get the word out. It’s not enough simply to know how you’re different, what your unique sales proposition is, or how your features and benefits stack up against the competition. That’s pieces of traditional marketing, cobbled together for the digital age. While you don’t want to spend months perfecting a strategy, because modern marketing stacks and tools allow you to test almost immediately, and therefor to learn and optimize almost immediately, you do want to expend some thought on how you intend to get there from here. |
