There are 3 ways your marketing should produce results for your business. Because it’s important for you to understand and correctly apply each of these most effectively, let’s look at each, one at a time.
The first way your marketing should produce results is the most common practice. While being the most common, it’s also the most used AND arguably, the method most businesses do least effectively.
Getting New Customers
The process of getting new customers is what most businesses struggle with most often. The reasons are two-fold:
- Businesses don’t ‘correctly’ do what’s needed.
- Businesses leave out or put less emphasis on the other two ways their marketing should produce results.
Obviously, without new business coming in the door, any given company is not likely to survive for very long.
The problem many businesses have is that they approach this activity in a variety of ways that reduce or even eliminate its effectiveness. This results in wasted money, time and effort and can produce a lot of frustration.
Not getting new customers in the door can also put you out of business.
Ok, so those are somewhat obvious. What you might be thinking now is, “I know all that – how and where do I get more new business”?
Hold on a second…if you’re spending any money, time, or resources and you’re not getting the results you need or want, you need to stop and consider why. Why would you want to keep throwing your resources and chasing the next “hot idea” before you begin getting the most from what you already have?
That’s the first way your marketing should produce results for your business. In other words, if your marketing activities – however many there are – are not individually able to optimize themselves to do better over time, they are not set up correctly.
It’s challenging to come up with any type of marketing activity that can’t be improved. Testing is one of the most effective and most profitable ways to generate more business from what you’ve already got going on in your marketing.
The trick is to do testing correctly, not haphazardly. Rushing through testing or doing it sloppily only produces inaccurate results. Taking action and making decisions based in inaccurate results can often mean you produce results worse than what you’re getting now.
Now before you say, “Well, if that’s the case, I’ll stay safe and not test and not change anything.”
You can certainly do that. If I were your competition, I’d send you a Thank You card for backing down and literally making more of our shared marketplace available to me for the taking.
When you make less of an intelligent effort than your competition, you almost certainly lose.
The way to make intelligent efforts and decisions is to test. You do it cost-effectively, with minimal risk. You do it incrementally without going overboard in any way. You do nothing you don’t feel uncertain about while also accepting the fact that, even at a very low level, testing involves an aspect of the unknown.
You are literally trying to find out what you and your competition don’t know about your target market. And because every aspect of all our lives is constantly evolving – even when it’s taking place very slowly, various aspects of your marketing will change.
Testing also helps you see marketing opportunities before your competitors. And if you have the type of business where competitors copy each other quite often, it’s in your best interests to stay on top of whatever advantages you can get.
The most commoditized businesses can still get a competitive edge when they look for ways to innovate. Sometimes this involves technology innovations and updates, but it can also be as simple as doing something a different way using existing technology.
Each industry is different and each business is different. You might run your business differently than your industry competitors – or maybe differently than SOME of your competitors. This can mean that depending on how you market and who you market to, some of your competitors are more REAL competitors than others.
One of the smartest things you can do is take something used or done in a different type of business and repurpose or reapply it to your business and your industry in a new way. Recognizing this type of twist in your favor can be a huge game-changer for you.
So that’s the first way your marketing should be producing results for your business. Getting new customers is crucial, but you need to think critically about the what, how, why, where, when, etc. – all those various aspects so you can get more results from existing and new possibilities.
If you need a kickstart to get your brain rolling in the right direction, touch base and let us give you some distinctively different ideas that you’ll want to consider. We don’t charge anything to share some initial concepts- the clock only starts if and when you officially put us to work.
And now, let’s consider the second way your marketing should produce results for your business…