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Measurement, Experimenting and
Creative Marketing Tactics
Forth in a 4 part series on "Getting Creative with your Marketing to Drive Sales"

No Matter How Good Our Products and Services Are
Today We Live and Die By Our Marketing and Sales

In the first three installments of this series (1, 2, 3) on marketing we talked about narrowing your market and the structuring of your message to take advantage of human psychology and your unique selling proposition to this target market. Then we talked about how you need to adjust this compared to marketing strategies of decades past.  Today we will discuss some strategies consistent with these concepts. This series could go on for ten more installments and does at the CEO & Entrepreneurship Boot Camp in Atlanta on November 14th and 15th. ☺

Today we can generally not take a shotgun marketing approach due to the high cost and poor results it generates for most businesses. We can also generally not target so well that there is not some waste in the marketing budget. The rifle shot is needed but often too difficult to do.  After all even with a perfect list of future prospects you don't know when they will be ready to buy.  So what is the compromise between the two?  Answer: A well defined niche that you can saturate with your brand and message based on a reasonable budget. The discipline to narrow your prospect list to be smaller is tough and important. It will make you seem bigger and even protect you from bigger competitors. Add to this a marketing funnel that steps up the expense only after a proven interest and you are on your way to a very cost efficient marketing campaign with lower cost per sale.

An actual list of target clients is ideal but sometimes you must choose a particular media like an industry trade journal or some other channel that is a good match. If you can purchase that list to create an in-house database this is powerful.  Then you can hit them over time with many contacts and your marketing efficiency will go up with time. In less than a year you will appear to be the lead player in that niche to these people even though you may only be a small company.

Frugal Experimentation

I really like the term "Frugal Experimentation". This means try lots of things on a small scale and then scale up those that work best. However, without repeated frequency (6-11X) these small marketing experiments might not pay for themselves initially. However, relative performance can be used to eliminate poor tactics early and then focus more effort and money on the better ones. Of course the core messages need to be the same or you can not really compare results across different tactics well. Since 80% of performance can come from the headline these should ideally be identical.

The old saying that 50% of your marketing budget goes to waste but you don't know which 50% is often true.  Sometimes 80% is wasted and 20% is pulling the weight and no one knows!  So how do you find and eliminate the waste? There are two good ways to do this:
     1) As previously mentioned try things on a small scale first and measure SALES and compare,
     2) As you get further down the pipeline with customers you can spend more time and money on fewer clients and increase your ability to close business.

This is a never ending process because the world out there is constantly changing. SO you must institutionalize the measurement and have it as part of your marketing culture.  Today you need to measure everything and require your marketing department to report an ROI measurement for each campaign.  This may not be "trackable" for everything but there is usually some proxy for this and you can even use the time to correlate business with the tactic by doing only one thing for a short period. Every customer must be tracked to a source as feedback to improve your marketing. Then you must use this information to both learn and tune your marketing plans. You learn by analyzing the customers you are getting through each tactic. Often the quality of prospects will vary enormously and even though you get more inquiries from a channel the resulting business at the end is poor because so many drop out along the way to a sale. Develop a dashboard for your marketing department to fill in weekly and monthly. Design it with no limits in mind and give them time to move to the place where they can report it all. To scale your business safely you need this information. Often times your SFA or CRM system will have built in tracking but you need to track end-to-end. Most companies drop the ball in connecting the marketing information to the sales information.

I like to make sure there is always some experimenting going on against a benchmark promotional baseline each quarter. We need a constant flow of new data because the market is always changing. We can interpolate and extrapolate from this if we have a good history to look at.  Then you can scale up that test if the result are good. Obviously you always stick with the tried and true and focus most of your budget there.

One to Consider:

I know a great little company that does "Guided Voicemail".  This is a recorded message delivered to the prospect's voicemail box that feels very personal.  Unlike an automated dialer they can get the message through the operator, gatekeeper/assistant and also verify the person still works there.  This is a powerful way to "touch" an existing customer, or a prospect, that is far cheaper than a personal sales call. This can be used to enhance the results of a mailing or emailing campaign. It can remind the customer of your interest in their business or get a special offer or event date out for you.  Or it can just touch a customer or prospect so they do not forget your company.

This is a cost effective way to generate more business from your existing customers or from high quality prospects. It is a lot cheaper than direct sales calls and telemarketing and a bit more than a quality direct mail piece. As such it is appropriate for fairly well qualified prospects and past customers you want to touch regularly.  Check them out at www.Boxpilot.com. One strength of this is that you can also control the delivery time very closely by selecting the exact day to deliver the message.  Therefore you can use it to follow-up on a direct mail piece or to promote an event. This can get you a better yield out of the first tactic.

This type of creative "customer touch" in your marketing mix provides more options and ways to measure and execute.  It is another tool to have in your toolbox that is ready to go when opportunities present or when your sales staff needs more good leads fast.  With the cost of physical sales calls exceeding $200 by most measures today and telemarketing calls over $2.50 this can be done at a fraction of this cost and used to complement your other marketing. Therefore even a small fraction of the yield can make the economics work very well.

Try something new each quarter, but make sure they are hitting mainly the same target customer group you are focused on. This will build you brand and effectiveness while generating profitable sales too. Hitting an entirely different audience that has never heard of you will be much less efficient.