In Part 1 of this series, we talked about the most well-known and popular way marketing produces results for your business – getting new customers. While being the most obvious method, because it is something almost all businesses invest in some way, shape, or form, it’s the most common.
In the 3 Ways Your Marketing Should Produce Results – Part 2 , your focus should turn to your future.
The majority of your business, the sheer number of sales that ‘could’ happen at some point in the future is how your business will survive. So you have day-to-day survival or weekly or monthly survival. You also have quarterly, yearly and overall long-term survival.
The longer look is something most businesses don’t plan for. It’s usually a perspective they reflect on once or twice a year.
Most businesses are most concerned about how much they sell today, this week and this month. They might eventually look at their quarterly statements and reflect on how well they did come tax time.
But few businesses emphasize ‘future sales’ as much as they do ‘more immediate sales’. This is a mistake.
Again, to drive the point home, we’re not denying that a smart business never looks at how they are doing compared to past years and maybe sets goals for the future.
What we’re talking about in 3 Ways Your Marketing Should Produce Results – Part 2 is what you put into action to make the results you want occur – over and above what you’re already doing or already planning.
Yes, it’s difficult and even extremely challenging for some businesses to do much more than get through another week without the distractions of being too future-focused. But it’s something that MUST be done to solidify your financial stability and growth.
This is assuming you’d like to grow your business proactively and be in control as opposed to hoping, waiting and wondering if or when it will happen and how quickly it will take place – if at all.
Wouldn’t you rather know that something you are doing is going to create sales 2, 3, 6 or 12 months from today, have an idea of what amount of revenue that will be, and be able to anticipate, if not plan for, staffing, equipment, real estate, insurance and other growth needs?
Just looking at what you’re doing now and projecting out what could happen is one thing.
Looking at what is likely to occur based on more effectively controlling your future is a very different situation of security and control.
So to keep it simple, you need to take a hard look at what your marketing does to get your business in front of prospective customers BEFORE they are ready to buy.
Part of this process includes segmenting your customers into existing and prospective customers. It can get more involved, but let’s stay with the basic concepts for now.
So out of your existing customers, you want to get them to buy from you more often. But from your prospective customers, you have two sub groups:
- Those who are currently doing business with your competition.
- Those who have not yet entered the market for what you and your competition sell.
One thing to emphasize here is that you NEVER want to do spray-and-pray marketing. This is where you do some form of marketing – usually advertising – and hope it somehow attracts buying customers to your business.
The reason why this seldom works as effectively as you want it to is because, ultimately, you are still focusing on 3 Ways Your Marketing Should Produce Results – Part 1: the low-hanging fruit.
The problems with spray-and-pray marketing/advertising are many, but most obvious is that if you are trying to attract a customer out of thin air, just because you might have got their attention for a split second and think that’s enough to get their business.
By doing this you severely underestimate what it takes to attract, motivate and keep a customer. And yes, your ability to keep a customer is also affected by how you got them in the first place.
So as an example, using spray-and-pray advertising usually means your ad has ‘the potential’ to be seen by high number and wide variety of people, but with little chance of paying for itself in the near future.
Considering that it’s already difficult enough to get people who are ready to buy to choose your commodity over your competition’s commodity, going after people who are not yet ready to buy or may not even have considered what you offer, is ‘hit and miss’ at best.
And most often that’s a complete ‘miss’.
For one thing, by the time the most unaware people finally do get around to buying what your industry offers, they have forgotten all about your spray-and-pray ad. You might not even be running that ad any longer so if they aren’t still seeing it, it’s a gamble getting their business.
Sure, you can dump money into a branding ad campaign and pay out a truckload of advertising dollars monthly or quarterly and hope that some day your ad pulls in those people. But why would you spend on that when those same dollars could have fenced them in to prefer you over your competitors as they were evolving into a customer for you?
Don’t fool yourself. Branding for the sake of branding does not produce the ROI advertising companies try to convince you it does. There are a few key elements of effective advertising that we can share with you (that we aren’t very public about) that will instantly reveal how we know this.
Admittedly, there are always exceptions. With spray-and-pray they are usually short-lived. If you have the deep pockets to do the standard branding approach and you can wait until ‘some day’ to make your money back, go for it. If you can establish your presence before your competitors get a foothold, your deep pockets can serve you well.
We are focusing mainly on the mid-range to smaller businesses in this advice and everything should be customized to your specific business – not just your industry. Suffice to say, we believe that branding is not something you should not spend extra money on. Just build it into your marketing automatically.
Branding should happen as ‘a natural by-product’ of doing more effective marketing.
Too many businesses fall in love with themselves before their customers do and make the mistake of focusing too much of their marketing resources on branding that will be there on it’s own when their marketing works.
The reason we’re pointing out this huge issue with branding is because that’s how many advertisers “sell” you on eventually getting customers – they say, “You’ve got to get your name out there and keep it out there so when the customer is ready, they see you instead of your competition”.
That statement is not completely wrong, but advertisers leave out some of the crucial details that make the statement work in your favor.
Yes, getting future customers is the point, but how you do it can sometimes increase sales or put you out of business.
So getting back to the point, you still need to get in front of the variety of customers that have different levels of awareness of your products or services.
And this is the key to the second of the 3 Ways Your Marketing Should Produce Results.
Below is a list of the different levels of awareness most businesses potentially face in their customer base. Your prospective customers range from…
- Most Aware (of what you offer and why it exists – they might know your product/service almost as well/better as you do)
- Product Aware (of what you offer and why)
- Solution aware (of how effective what you offer is at what it does)
- Problem Aware (of how what you offer solves their problem or need)
- Not aware (of any of the above)
Look at the above list and think about which level of awareness you target you marketing to focus on. Most businesses focus on one or two level of awareness.
Generally speaking, the lower on the scale the prospect is, the longer the road to a sale. After all, there’s a certain amount of info people want before committing to a purchase. Obvious the price tag, availability, how well you inform and educate them, and other considerations come into play, too.
In reality, every business has every level of awareness to consider, they just don’t go after every level of awareness. Most businesses wait until prospects have a need or gradually become informed enough to make contact
Sure, there may be a little ‘gray area’ overlap in some levels of awareness, but in those situations it’s almost always because you don’t want to fine-tune your marketing (for whatever reasons) to specifically address a fine-tuned level of awareness.
These lower levels of awareness are where your future sales live.
The more you create marketing messages that target specific personas and demographics in any given individual level of awareness, the more your marketing pulls in customers from that specific level.
Low-hanging fruit doesn’t always come from any particular level of awareness. What makes all the difference is the marketing message you present to any given level and how willing and capable you are of going the distance needed. We do see a lot of low-hanging fruit in the upper levels for a lot of businesses, mainly because there’s less want/need/desire at the lower levels.
But again, that’s the point when ‘growing’ future customers. You plant the seed, nurture the process and harvest the sales.
If you want to bounce some ideas off us or have some questions on how to go deeper on this topic make contact. We’re actually here to help you in whatever way we can.
So after focusing on present sales (Part 1) and future sales (Part 2), what else is there?