Infinite options; finite resources

There is no lack of places to spend your marketing time and money. The key is to separate the productive options from the mere distractions, and then tackle the most productive options in order.

It helps to keep in mind the two most important results of your marketing efforts:

1. Drive more traffic (prospects) to your website, and

2. Turn more of that traffic into paying customers.

If you’re facing a marketing opportunity that doesn’t do one of these two things, you don’t need to give it anymore thought. Just cross it off your list.

But that still leaves a number of places to focus. How do you choose among them?

Website first

As I write this article, the website is still the heart of any good marketing effort. Most – if not all – of your leads and prospects will land on your website while they’re making a buying decision. It’s where they first get to know you. Multiple 3rd party studies have proven this to be true.

If you haven’t given much thought to your website lately, now is a good time to do it. Take a look at your bounce rate. If your website is driving most of your visitors away, fix that first.

Traffic second

Once you know your website is doing a decent job of holding your visitors, you can comfortably drive more traffic there. Work on this until you have a sufficient level of traffic to begin supporting your sales goals.

How much traffic is enough? That answer depends on how many new customers (for an ecommerce site) or new customer opportunities (for a lead generation site) you need to produce. I recently wrote a how-to article about this for the Cranking Widgets blog. You can read it for help on figuring out your traffic requirements: How to Be Certain You’re Spending Marketing Money Wisely.

Conversions third

Websites and traffic generation are the blocking and tackling of a good marketing program. Conversion optimization – moving more visitors and prospects to take the action(s) you want them to take – is where smart marketers begin to run up the score.

Once you’ve got your website and traffic generation humming along, you can focus ere. Get better at converting visitors to prospects and prospects to customers and you’ll quickly see the effect on your bottom line: more customers and lower acquisition costs.

The message: Avoid distractions

Distractions can kill your marketing budget. Few things really make a difference in getting paid. Focus on those. 1) Drive more traffic to your website and 2) Do more with the traffic you get.

It’s been a while since I’ve written about squeezing the most from your incredibly important website. More on that in the next article.

Meanwhile, how do you avoid marketing distractions?

Andy (Parkinson, our CEO) and I sat down yesterday over lunch at Paco’s Tacos to talk about the best market for one of our new services (more on that in a future post).

At Andy’s suggestion, we first made a list of qualities a good target market for this service must have. It’s not a long list. Clients need money to spend on marketing. They need a sufficient amount of traffic to their website. They need a product or service to sell. And it helps if they are not technologically savvy or the do-it-yourself types.

In less than 20 minutes, while eating lunch, we identified and rejected a half dozen potential markets, finally hitting on two that offered the most promise. Ten minutes later we had a plan for finding and creating customers. The bill came and we were done.

That thirty-minute exercise gave us focus and kept us from wasting money and time chasing after the wrong targets – or worse – having no target at all. It’s essential when you’re expanding your markets and / or your product offering; but I suggest taking a good look at your ideal prospects before jumping into any marketing program even when you’re not introducing anything new.

After all, markets change and it’s easier than you might think to be chasing the wrong prospects. I’ve seen it happen with some of our best clients.

Look around you

Your existing client base holds a wealth of information about who makes a good target prospect. If you take the time to identify the customers who are most profitable and easiest to work with and figure out what they have in common, you’ll have a remarkably accurate portrait of your best prospects.

Not surprisingly, it’s better to do this with data – not just with anecdotal evidence from your sales force or account management teams. Really. Take the time to pull the data and analyze it.

If you’ve never actually done this exercise before, you might be in for a surprise. I’ve had a client tell me their customer base was primarily Fortune 1000 pharmaceutical or oil & gas companies only to find when the numbers were run that the bulk of their business was coming from regional insurance companies. And a client who believed their sweet spot was companies with more than 5000 employees when in reality their best customers have 500 to 2500 employees. And a client who thought corporations provide the bulk of their business when actually academic institutions do. And so on.

These clients weren’t lying to me. They just hadn’t taken a real close, objective look at the customer base lately. Things change, and when you’re involved in it day-to-day the changes are often not so noticeable.

It’s important to look at the numbers, identify your most profitable customers and find out what they have in common – industry, annual revenue, number of employees, geographic location, number of purchase orders they write a month – whatever is appropriate to your product or service.

Now you’ve got a good, clear idea of what types of companies make your best customers and you’ve taken the first step towards describing your ideal prospect. You’ve also probably found some good places to target a marketing effort.

But don’t stop here.

Our buyers are individuals, not companies.

Now that you know the types of companies that make up your ideal customer pool, take a look at the individuals to whom you sell.

Again, what do they have in common with each other? Here’s a quick checklist of things to consider:

• Job title
• Age
• Sex
• Education
• Number of years of experience
• Achievements
• Associations
• Primary language
• Resistance to risk
• Decision-making style
• Professional challenges
• Values
• Goals

Roll all of this together to create a profile of your ideal customer. That’s a pretty good place to start to describe your ideal prospect. Doesn’t it just make sense to go after more of the people who make you most successful today?

Instead of worrying about a detailed marketing plan, get your essentials in order and then get going.

What do you need for really great marketing? That’s easy.

• A market
• A message
• Some goals
• A website
• Action

Who is going to buy your product or service?

Key word: “buy”. Successful companies no longer sell. We help buyers buy. This requires diving deeply into who your buyers are, what problems or opportunities they are facing and what’s keeping them from solving those problems or jumping on those opportunities.

Why should they buy from you?

Our buyers have options. In most cases they don’t have to buy from us. As marketers we must figure out what makes us the best option for the buyer. Then we must communicate it – at the right time, at the right place, and in the right way.

Where is the finish line?

Someone once said “If you don’t know where you’re going, you may never get there”. Similarly, if you don’t know what your marketing needs to accomplish, you could burn a ton of money heading in the wrong direction.

Setting marketing objectives is easy once you realize there is only one reason for marketing’s existence: to help increase sales. Start with your sales objectives and work backward from there. We’ll show you how to do that in a future article.

Your home online

Every company needs a website. That might sound like a terribly broad statement, but it’s true. You’re reading this blog so I’ll leap to the assumption you want productive marketing. You need a website – a good one.

Don’t fool yourself into thinking websites don’t matter and you might as well go cheap. Your website is critical. It’s your online sales force, working for you 24 / 7. It’s often your buyers’ first encounter with your company.

Act with confidence

Now we get to the good part. With the other elements in place, you’re well prepared to take action. Go get visible. Generate leads. Turn them into customers. Have some fun.

That’s easy, right? Don’t worry. It’s not as hard as you might think. Stick with us and we’ll share what we’ve learned. We’ll even keep learning together.

If someone paid me my hourly rate equivalent (HRE) for all the time I’ve spent researching, pondering, debating and writing marketing plans that a) sat on a shelf, b) were outdated the minute they were published or c) never got finished, I’d be back in the 1990s.

But I’m smarter now. I know a waste of time when I see one.

When we first started Clicks ‘n Conversions, we did some marketing plans; but they were shorter than the hundred+ page tomes of yesteryear. And as the plans got shorter, they began to be more useful.

I agree planning isn’t totally without value. I wasn’t the first one to think of this, but the real benefit of planning is the discussions it inspires.

When you create a marketing plan, you force yourself to look at key elements of your business: what you’re going to sell, who is going to buy, how you’re going to get them to buy it, what and how you’re going to charge for it and how you’re going to get it to them.

This is good.

But it’s easy to let the plan and its planning stand between you and taking action. You know you’re caught in this trap when you say or think things like:

• That sounds like a good idea. Let’s look at it again when the plan is finished.
• We need to schedule an off-site meeting to kick off the marketing plan.
• No one here knows how to do a marketing plan. We’d better bring in a pro.
• It’s September; time to get started on next year’s plan.

The world’s shortest marketing plan

Part of the blame for excessively long plans, I think, goes to the many books and templates for generating marketing plans. Often, the templates themselves run upwards of 30 pages. I like to think this is because they are generic and must address every conceivable option known to man and not because the authors really believe a marketing plan needs to include all that stuff.

As Kelly Odell pointed out in a blog article some years ago, marketing templates may have their greatest value in showing you what you don’t need to worry about.

Kelly also first introduced the template for the World’s Shortest Marketing Plan, which was later revised by Guy Kawasaki in the World’s Shortest Marketing Plan version 2.0. Click here to get the template.

Take smaller steps

Nowadays its better to plan a little, test a little, adjust a little, review.

Elaborate marketing plans delay action and never really get used. Avoid that trap and you’ll get to the good part much faster.

Next article I’ll write about all you really need to figure out to have an awesome marketing program.

Meanwhile, what do you think about marketing plans?

Fortunately, it’s no longer necessary to waste money on marketing. It’s well within every marketer’s reach to understand the who, what, where, when, how – and even why – of your customers and their buying habits.

Unfortunately, an unspeakable number of marketers still burn money.

That needs to stop. (Unless it’s your competitors who are doing the burning.)

We have the tools to identify where we want to go and let our buyers and potential buyers keep us on track. The problem is that marketers (being people) tend to get distracted by the latest fad and claims of easy wins or they are stuck doing things the same old way because it worked in the past.

Time to wake up and take control.

The path to winning more customers efficiently is tough but pretty straightforward. First and foremost, remember the job of marketing is to improve sales.  If someone suggests a marketing program that doesn’t make a direct, measurable contribution to sales, just say no. Later, when you have all the leads you need, you can play around with branding for the sake of branding.

Our goal with this Clicks ‘n Conversions blog is to share what we’ve learned – and continue to learn – about marketing that works. You don’t need tons of money or a huge staff or a fancy agency to do great marketing. You just need to focus.

In upcoming articles we’ll show you how to get ready, get found and get more customers for your marketing dollars. We’ll also show you how to make the best decisions, take the right actions and avoid distracting, money-sucking detours.

Just as technology and the internet have empowered buyers to drive their own decision-making process, marketers too have much to gain by using the tools and tactics available to them. We’ll show you how we use those tools and tactics to build powerful marketing machines for ourselves and for our clients. We’ll show you how you can use them too.

If you want to crank up your marketing efforts, get better results and save yourself some dough, subscribe to our blog and follow along with us. Be sure leave your comments, too.

Unfortunately, as things become cheaper and easier to do, they also become more poorly done.

At Clicks ‘n Conversions we see the downside of marketing applications affecting nearly every good company that comes our way. In general, these good companies are heading in the right direction; but they’re learning the marketing equivalent of an engineering truism: a CAD program does not make you a good airplane designer.

Here, in no particular order, is my list of 6 common examples of marketing technology driving mediocrity.

1. Pay-per-click advertising

Google has succeeded in making even the most inexperienced user feel right at home spending tons of money on pay-per-click advertising. Adwords (Google’s pay-per-click program) has a fantastically simple-to-use interface.

But guess what.

As Adwords has become easier to use, performance for marketers in general has tumbled. Costs have gone up and returns on investment have gone down. In reality Google has just made it easier for companies to waste a lot of money.

2. Email marketing

Marketers love email because they see it as nearly free. Hey, for $20 a month you can blast newsletters and spam messages to anyone on your list. As a result it’s become extremely difficult to get real messages through to people who value the content. Wonder why direct mail is gaining in use again?

3. A/B and multivariate testing applications

I applaud the people who are making testing options available to smaller marketers; but without some knowledge of what should be tested and for how long, marketers can waste a lot of time. Does a green button get clicked more often than a red button? Is it worth waiting six months to find out?

4. Website analytics

Like testing capabilities, website analytics can bring game-changing knowledge and good actionable data to marketers of all sizes. The problem is it can also paralyze you with data overload – often in pretty dashboard charts that provide information you don’t really need. How many analytics applications are cranking out weekly reports that no one reads?

5. Desktop Publishing

Desktop publishing is an ancient – but great – example of technology driving mediocrity. Since the day desktop publishing programs hit the market, the developed world has been inundated with really awful brochures, ads and websites. And by “awful” I don’t mean just ugly. At best they are ineffective; at worst they destroy the company’s brand.

6. Automated articles submissions, directory submissions, link building programs, etc.

These applications make it possible to blast an article, website listing, linking invitation or meeting request to hundreds or even thousands of recipients with the click of a button. On the surface it has a pretty good wow factor. But, when you’re sending the same message or content to everyone, quality goes out the window. Humans quickly realize you’re spamming them and unless the recipient of these blasts is another automated system, you’re going to be ignored. These tools can make you lazy.
 
Proceed with caution

As you may have noticed, my issues with these applications are not with the applications themselves. I think most of them are great. We use nearly all of them.

The danger in these applications is the absence of people who know what they’re doing. It takes some marketing expertise to drive the best results. Smart business owners will either set aside the time to learn the underlying concepts or set aside the money to hire someone who does.

I’m sure my seven are not the only “dangerous” DIY marketing applications. What others have you run across?

Today’s post covers getting to know your website visitors. Check it out. I think you’ll find it interesting.  One Hour Marketing – Week One – Get to Know Your Visitors.

See you there.

But something went terribly wrong.

While we were building our awesome marketing machine, the sales closing rate was tanking. Turns out it was continuing a rapid downhill trend that had begun well before we got involved. And everyone was busy blaming marketing.

“These leads are crap.”

Every marketing person alive has heard that complaint an endless number of times. Sometimes it’s true; the so-called leads really are crap. Sometimes it means marketing is tossing leads to the sales team too soon. And sometimes, as in this case, it means the sales people and their sales process are out of touch.

In this story – which is, unfortunately, true – the sales process had not changed in over seven years; but both the market and the buying process had changed enormously.

Competition, much of it on the sleazy side, had piled onto what had once been a lucrative seller’s market. Buyers were not only overwhelmed with choices; they had also become wary of vendor claims. And, the internet with its easy-to-access information for all had made buyers much more savvy decision makers.

Our client was using order-takers in what had become a consultative selling situation.

Has your sales process kept up?

Granted, your market may not have shifted as dramatically as our client’s had; but I guarantee you it’s different than it was seven years ago.

Our client wasted valuable time – and lots of money – with a knee-jerk reaction to falling closing rates. They assumed it was a marketing issue. It wasn’t. In the end it was a leadership issue. But it was also a communications issue. Had marketing and sales really been working well together; had management been asking the right questions; maybe much of this could have been avoided.

If you’re a business owner, I’m sure you’re keeping a close eye on sales and closing rates. If you’re a marketing person, you should be watching those numbers too.

The reason I’m sharing this story with you is to send out two messages:

1. When closing rates fall, it’s dangerous to assume all leads are bad.

2. Never before have markets, buyers and buying processes changed as fast and as much as they are changing now. Your marketing programs have to keep up. So do your sales processes. Just because it worked yesterday doesn’t mean it’s going to work today.

Our client got these messages the hard way. You can avoid that.

When was the last time you took a good look at your sales process?

As I was writing yesterday’s article on Finding Time for Marketing I began to wonder about the minimum amount of time a business owner has to spend on marketing to actually make something happen.

Can enough be accomplished in just an hour a week?

Honestly, I have no idea how well it will work long term. But I’m absolutely positive that one hour a week is better than postponing or ignoring marketing indefinitely. And, since I’m a curious person, I decided this would be an interesting question to answer. Thus this experiment.

For an as-yet-undetermined amount of time, every Monday this blog will feature a marketing action list for the week – a way to spend your hour. If you follow the list and stick with it, I can guarantee you’ll have a better marketing program three months from now.

Will that last forever?

Who knows. Maybe you really can make enough happen in one hour a week. More likely you’ll find that once you start seeing results you’ll suddenly be able to find more time (amazing how that works) or you’ll justify hiring someone to focus all their time on marketing.

For now, there’s one thing you must be willing to do: commit to one hour a week. Go ahead; put it on your calendar; and put everything else aside for that hour.

If you already have a pretty good marketing program going, follow along with us anyway. You’ll end up performing a valuable checkup of your program.

See you next Monday for the first week’s list.

Maybe it’s just that first of the year thing.

As you might imagine, I hear a lot of excuses about why marketing is slow to happen. One of the top excuses among almost all of us (including me) is “I can’t find the time”.

Can we all agree to stop that now?

I figure if you’re reading this blog you’re either a) a business owner or b) a marketing or sales professional or maybe c) a member of my family trying to figure out what I do. Group C is pretty small.

If you’re in group A and you want to grow your business, or you’re in group B and you want to keep your job, you can’t not have time for marketing. (I know that sentence is incorrect, but I’m leaving it that way).

In addition to marketing, I happen to have an interest in personal productivity and I’ve spent a good deal of time (and money) studying it. I think some of the concepts and tools provided by personal productivity experts are very applicable to marketing – goal setting, time management, mindset, anti-procrastination to name a few.

Many of the exercises productivity experts encourage us to do are designed to help us identify unproductive activities and time wasters and stop doing them; thereby free up additional time for the important things such as, say, marketing.

I’m not going to pretend to be a productivity expert – that would not be a productive use of my time. But there are plenty of people out there ready, willing and able to guide you if you’re interested. Right now I’m finding the most useful input coming from Michael Masterson at Early to Rise (particularly good for business owners), PJ McClure (if procrastination is a problem) and the Aaron / Andy combo at Cranking Widgets (process and delegation experts). And of course David Allen in my opinion still has the best method for getting organized and Getting Things Done.

Is it easy to find time for marketing? Of course not. If it were, you’d be doing it. But I do believe you CAN find time for marketing; it just has to be important enough to you.

How do you find time for marketing? Got any good ideas to share here?