Three Attributes to Successful Marketing
Time is Critical
In a lifetime the average brit will spend on average one year of their working life off sick, five months complaining and according to a survey from Hilary’s Blinds an average of eight minutes a day moaning about bad service! I don’t know about you, but this may be a little longer in my case.
When working with businesses a common excuse/ barrier as to why nothing is happening with the marketing for the company is…wait for it. “We just don’t have the time!”
You need to ask yourself, do you have time to invoice? Or if you didn’t have any clients to invoice, would you then have time to go to market? However, if you reach that point, even marketing may not pull you from the Quagmire
It is very easy to put off doing anything whilst you have a healthy supply of customers, but try planting your crops out of season and you won’t have a harvest. In order to succeed every entrepreneur needs to put in the effort, and make time to follow up on activities.
You do however have options, if you really don’t have time, you need to delegate the responsibility to someone else or outsource the work.
To be successful with marketing you need to make the time to create a strategy, plan activity, execute, review and once complete, do it all again.
Here a couple of other tips to help
Spend your Money.
I often get drawn into the age old question around how much should I spend on marketing? There are various schools of thought on this matter, including 5% of total revenue but I like to shy away from this.
My question is what do you want to achieve? Do you want ten new customers or sixty downloads of your new e-Book etc. and then work backwards. Look at what the monitory value of achieving this will be, and also the unseen benefits such as brand awareness or long term upsell opportunities.
From this you should gleam some insight around the real value of success, and then look at the best ways to achieve this and how much they will cost.
If the return exceeds the investment, then isn’t that a good thing? How many of us given £10 would not be happy getting £13 back a month (providing we didn’t need to spend that £10 during that period)
Assessing each activity on its potential return or grouping these based on the success is in my opinion a much better way of assigning your budget and spend to marketing.
Patience.
There is a wonderful line in the “Book Thief” by Markus Zusak which says “Trust me, though, the words were on their way, and when they arrived, Liesel would hold them in her hands like the clouds, and she would wring them out like rain.” Whilst beautifully poetic, it holds some meaning.
When we look to do marketing, we often demand instant results, we often believe that by sending one flyer or email this will somehow be enough to cut through the hundreds of messages that the customer is receiving and somehow convince them that they need to spend money with you RIGHT NOW!
If only that were true! It may work more so in consumer marketing, but I have yet to meet a purchasing director so emotionally moved by an email that he stop demanding ridiculous discounts and begged to send me a PO without consulting other potential suppliers.
You must have patience when it comes to marketing, patience to plan and create the right messaging. Patience to execute and wait for results, and patience for the fruits of your labour to ripen to satisfy the hunger.
As I often say to the poor unfortunates that have to hear me speak, Marketing is not a quick fix nor a magic bullet to overcome pre-existing challenges with your sales process, it is something in its own right, that requires the virtues of time, investment and patience.
If this blog has got your grey matter whirring? Or you want to have a chat about getting marketing in shape, get in touch
