It’s a common belief in the marketing industry, that 50% of all marketing strategies work! The challenge is, which 50% is it!
What makes a successfully developed campaign or strategy from your marketing team super successful? Why can a team that constructs a successful marketing strategy once, fail to achieve the same kind of results the next go round? How can marketing strategies work for one company, but fail to produce any results for another?
These and many other questions just like them, confuse many marketers and businesses alike. Often from companies afflicted with less than stellar marketing results, you’ll hear broad stroke statements like; Facebook doesn’t work for my business, email is dead, social media is a waste of money, or any other concluding statement.
Unfortunately these statements are not only untrue, but damage the creativity of a company and their marketing team to achieve greater results. I mean let’s face it, if we look at any one of the above broad stroke statements, we can easily debunk their logic. For example;
FaceBook doesn’t work for my business.
So you’re telling me that with over 1 billion plus people on FaceBook (the majority for over an hour each day), that your ideal client is not there. Of course not, right? That would be ridiculous! What you’re really saying is that you have not found a way to make FaceBook work for your business. But that’s a completely different statement. And that’s a statement and understanding which can empower your business, instead of sabotage its efforts.
Email is dead.
According to the direct marketing association (DMA), email has a 3800% ROI. What other marketing strategies are you using that has that type of return? I say no more!
Social Media is a waste of money.
Although many companies struggle to understand what the ROI is on social media, I think we all understand that our audience is there in one way or another. The challenge for most is understanding what role it is actually playing in our success. Understanding attributed social conversions in Google Analytics is key to understanding what exactly social media is doing for you. But I will say this, you’re likely to be surprised with the average conversion having many more than a single visit to your website from multiple sources prior to any type of conversion.
So if it is true that 50% of all marketing works, and I would challenge that 100% of all marketing “can work”, then how exactly do we discover the magical strategy?
As a professional marketer and a company that provides digital marketing solutions, we have found that the magic comes from a 3 step strategy for which I will now divulge.
Anticipate Failure of your Marketing Strategies
I know, you’re reading that sub-head and saying what!!?!?! But it’s true for multiple reasons. If you believe that your strategy is going to fail, there are a few key things that happen.
First, you’re going to limit your exposure. If you approach each strategy like it will fail, you’re going to be timid about blowing your budget. We refer to this approach as using a slingshot. We never, ever recommend beginning a strategy with a cannon, but rather a slingshot to determine its effectiveness. This way, if it fails, which the probability is high, than damage is minimal. We brush off, and attack with the next slingshot.
Second, if you anticipate failure, you are mentally okay to give up on an idea and move on to the next. The approach becomes one of failing fast forward to get to success. As long as we are not emotionally hung up on “the greatest idea ever”, then we can keep moving forward until we know we’ve found a winner.
I can hear what your saying…”how many times do I fail before I should have a winner”. There is no fixed answer here, but there are a lot of key steps you can take so you’re one in three and not one in twenty. The better you get at knowing your audience, the better your numbers will get.
Clearly Identify Your Marketing Resistance Points
This is a big topic, and one that deserves a tremendous amount of attention beyond this article, but let me give you an example to start the thought process going.
Let’s say you run a pay-per-click (PPC) advertisement to drive traffic to your website. What ducks have to be in a row for that click of your potential customer to occur? There are definitely a lot of variables, but we’ll keep it simple here with three obvious ones;
- Your advertisement has to appear where you ideal customer actually is hanging out. Resistance point one!
For example; If your potential customer is over 65, with disposable income, marketing on a mobile video game app, is likely not going to drive a lot of the right traffic directed at your website.
- Your advertisement needs to catch my attention. Resistance point two!
In today’s busy world with so many distractions vying for our attention, getting the attention of your ideal customer is a challenge. Key variables like quality headline copy, images, and colour selection to name a few, should not be underestimated.
- Your advertisement needs to compel me to click. Resistance point three!
So you’re advertising where your client is hanging out, you’ve caught my attention with a good headline, and image, but do I feel compelled to click through? Time is valuable and people know it! Having a compelling call to action that not only interests me, but creates an immediate desire to look more now, is critical.
Just think, your ideal customer hasn’t even arrived yet on your site, and we’ve identified three resistance points that might stop them from ever coming. This begs the question, how do we identify the resistance points that are hindering our marketing strategies success? Great question, which brings us to the third step..
Measurement is Key To Improvement
Most marketers and businesses do okay with the first two steps at least in theory. They think about where their customer is hanging out, what they are consuming and how they can get in front of them. They put resources into creating clever material to gain their potential customers attention. Unfortunately this is where most businesses stop, and why most marketing fails!
Consider that if you do the first two steps, without step three, you’re simply hoping things work. But what if they don’t (highly probably out of the gate)? Then what? Well you either try harder (spend more) and hope some more, or abandon the idea and make a broad stroke statement like “X” doesn’t work for my business.
But what if you identified the resistance points, and measured each of them for their performance. Then you could identify what was working, and what required refinement. You could massage your marketing to success, step by step, through a systematic process. You could multiply results by knowing where to focus to return the highest probability of greatest success.
By following these three steps, and through the use of measurement tools like Google Analytics (free introduction training), and platform metric dashboards, you can absolutely multiply marketing strategy results, and find your 50% of marketing that works.
Now it’s your turn let me know in the comments below, what are your steps to finding successful marketing strategies.
