Thanks to the internet, good marketing results and rising sales incomes can be much loftier than merely incremental. Like other investments that compound, good marketing should expand and multiply itself exponentially over time. When you truly determine, define and tap deeper into your market, an extremely powerful business asset materializes. Think virality.
Question: Do you feel your company’s marketing should be producing better than it does? If so, you may have become a member of a very old club no company should ever join…It is time to revoke your membership.
About a hundred years ago, a successful merchant at the time (think Macy’s), and considered to be a pioneer in marketing said this:
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted.
The trouble is, I don’t know which half.”
-John Wanamaker
Obviously, marketing that disappoints has been around since advertising was born. Though John struggled with his a century ago, the waste remains prevalent and antagonizes most companies today.
Companies should always be questioning themselves.
In fact, a majority of managers know (or at least sense) that their company’s marketing fritters away glorious amounts of time and money today, but don’t know what to do about it.
Do you believe your financial and time commitment to marketing should return more than it does?
Sound marketing principles deliver superior results and getting good at them is as important as the need to attract new customers itself. They are as joined at the hip as can be. Good marketing results won’t manifest without them.
Optimizing your company’s marketing practices will maximize investment returns and increase your top-line sales revenue. Guaranteed.
Part of the reason for so much squandered time and money is that marketing and advertising are inexact art and sciences. Though art can never be made perfect, increased and measurable returns on marketing investment (ROMI) are always attainable. Creative advancements (the art), new forms of content delivery (media) and extensive analytics development (the science) make standout results possible.
Today is truly the age of the consumer. Customers define markets like never before based on their own perspectives and experiences, beginning with how well product marketing and advertising speaks to them.
If your company can empathize with people, the opportunity to make its marketing performance more precise and effective than ever before has arrived.
If this sounds like superhero stuff, that’s because it can be that.
Increasing sales while using the same budget tends to have a superhero effect. As it should. The even better news is that improved marketing, once tested and published, begins delivering positive results almost immediately.
Like most things, ROMI improvement does take incremental steps. But more effective market connections tend to begin delivering returns before very long.
The opportunity and starting point is to decide that you can and are determined to optimize your company’s marketing, so it will perform and produce as well it possibly can.
Now is a great time to begin working towards that success goal.
Some interesting industry data:
- “Our marketing specialists found that up to 60% of digital spent is wasted every year globally. Up to 35% of all web activity is fraudulent or artificial and 54% of online ads are not even seen by a human due to viewability issues.”…Proxima
- “Billions of digital marketing dollars are being wasted as online advertisements miss their intended targets entirely.”…CNBC
- “Advertising for cars fares poorly, with only 45 percent reaching their intended audience, followed by ads for computers and electronics and shopping and retail (all near 49 percent). The best-performing sector is travel where still only 65 percent of online ads reached the right people.”…Nielsen
- “93% of CMO’s say they are under increasing pressure to deliver measurable ROI.”…Leapfrog Marketing Institute
- “Only 8% of companies say they can determine ROI from their social media spending.”…CMO.com
- “50% of companies find it difficult to attribute marketing activity directly to revenue results.”…CMO.com
- “40% of marketing departments think their companies’ marketing is ineffective.”…CMO.com
- “81% of companies would increase spending on digital, mobile and social channels if they could better track ROI.”…Proxima
Good Marketing Results Are Attainable
Are too much of your company’s money and time being wasted today? No matter what volume of business, your marketing budget is a precious commodity.
It must produce for you. It’s your investment back into your own company. You need it to help you grow. You don’t want to just survive; you want your company to thrive. If your marketing disappoints, today is the perfect day to stop tolerating it.
So what are some ways you can finally enjoy good marketing results?
The real opportunity is not to just trim waste. Your objective is to turn financial and time decay directly back into sales income; the reason why you execute marketing in the first place.
Does your company adequately manage and track your marketing and its performance every day?
Answering these Ten Questions will help with your evaluation (PDF version for print):
TEN QUESTIONS TO ASK OF YOUR MARKETING
- Has our company developed clear and complete buyer profiles (personas) that identifies researched insights-driven demographics, income levels, interests, behaviors (including internet), what prospects read, watch, listen to, where they live and go, and more, for purposes of reaching ideal customers and clients (precise market targeting)?
- Do we currently measure, record and archive the effectiveness of all published marketing content, routinely abandon or fix the poor performing offenders and optimize (exploit) those that do well?
- Does our company perform marketing effectiveness audits to quantify the true return on our marketing investments and identify how we can transform the segments of ineffective budget spending into new sales revenue flow?
- What platforms (direct, indirect, organic, paid) do we use (social media, Email, print, direct mail, paid ads, etc.)? How are we monitoring and measuring the ROMI of each? How can we evaluate, reform or dismiss initiatives when they don’t perform well?
- Does our marketing staff think of marketing from a scientific perspective? What meaningful metrics are we using? In what ways? To what extent? And to what degree of depth?
- Knowing there is a good chance that 40-60% of our marketing budget is being wasted, what is our overall strategy going to be to Make our investment of time and money do its job better?
- How good are we at attributing our marketing activity directly to our sales revenue results?
- What marketing measure tools and techniques are we using? Which ones need to be retired? What can and should we do to evaluate and acquire updated tools and techniques for our company?
- What are the top three things our marketing department should stop doing immediately?
- How well are we marketing to our current customers and how are we encouraging referrals?
“What we measure improves.”
-Peter Drucker
Additional open-ended questions for your team:
If you (the team) had a magic wand, what would you change about our marketing department?
What exactly do we want our company’s marketing results to look like and how can we get it there?
Kind regards,
Jim Campbell
In-The-Flow Marketing
Email: Jim@In-The-Flow.com
Phone: 310-487-4306
Website: In-The-Flow.com
P.S. While you’re evaluating your current marketing, be sure to download our free 40-page Ebook, “How To Turn More Consumers Into Brand New Customers For Your Company.” The principles I use for The 30-Day Marketing Makeover and much of everything else I do is in this Ebook. I believe it will help you more than you may imagine.
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