What if you got all of your customers together in the same room so they could compare their experiences with each other. How many of them would share the same experience?
A Big Mac tastes the same in Paris, France, as it does in Paris, Texas, because McDonalds has a standard. It doesn’t matter who is at the counter or who is on the grill. Your experience as a customer should be the same. Customers want consistency, they want to know what they can expect.
If you can’t articulate your customer’s journey when buying from your company, then you may not understand what’s actually happening with your customer’s thinking processes. And consequently, your actions as a company may not be aligned with that journey. And to the previous point, that journey may not be consistent depending on who the customer deals with in your business because there isn't any standard.
For a very large percentage of small business, marketing activities happen on a random basis without any real plan to guide things. And I am not talking about a media calendar plan either. I am talking about a plan of action that takes you through a step-by-step sequence of activity with each prospect.
If you don’t have consistency within your organization, you cannot apply common definitions to things like what constitutes a “qualified lead” or a bonafide “sales opportunity”. One person’s definition or view of those things are invariably different than someone else’s.
What would happen to McDonald’s and the Big Mac if a sandwich were left open to interpretation from one store to the next? There many ways to put a cheeseburger together, even with the identical ingredients from store to store. But there’s only one, exact recipe to make a Big Mac. Right?
If your customers aren’t buying from you, and you don’t know why, there could be a problem with your marketing and sales. Something is broken, but your system… your process isn’t capable of pointing to the exact area. But the reality is that it’s just as bad if your customers ARE buying from you… and you still don’t know why. Of course everyone is happy to have a customer, so the question gets buried… but it’s so important to understand how your customer thinks and more importantly how they make decisions!
In a lot of small businesses, marketing is just a random event that happens based on a whim or spontaneous idea. Maybe the ad sales rep from the local paper stops by with a great deal on the weekend insert. While they’re here, we'll just let them come up with the ad copy and design to save time. Ugh.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of marketing dabblers out in the business world. And there are a lot of advertising people that make a lot of money off of the dabblers without any regard to the effectiveness of the marketing solution they’re pitching.
Most businesses have no method of measuring the effectiveness of their efforts – how do you measure something when it’s random, and not planned?
Without any defined marketing goals or marketing objectives, how does any business really know if the investments it’s making in its marketing is even effective or not?
So when the marketing is approached from a random, spontaneous basis, what are some typical results?
Well the first is that there’s really no way to measure or acknowledge the effectiveness of the actual promotion. It’s spontaneous, what are we measuring it against?
What was the goal?
What were we communicating, to who, and why?
How do we even know it’s effective?
Oh that’s right, we promoted a discount! We offered some price leader incentive. That’s the way to financial success… and we did it because the ad sales rep said it would be a good idea! I am being completely sarcastic about this. It's a terrible idea.
I recently read a story about a dentist that hired a kid to put up a little website. Sure, that’s great! He needs a website for his practice, so no problem there. The dentist claimed the next month that his office traffic was way up and attributed the success to his little one pager website. But here’s the funny part - the business was coming from a satisfied parent that sat at a school meeting talking about what great work the guy did. Meanwhile, the dentist thought it was all coming from the website. But without a complete system in place, there was no way for him to realize the true source of the business.
I frequently encounter small business owners who hit the proverbial brick wall with one of their random, spontaneous marketing campaigns, and announces to everyone “that internet XYZ thing doesn’t work”. They answered the phone and it was a cold call from some search engine guy who claims that for $5,000 they can get their site onto the front page of Google. Great! Fantastic, and sure enough, the guy shows up for a week. But even so, his website didn’t have any mechanism to capture the visitor’s information through some kind of opt-in, and when the phone didn’t ring off the hook like the SEO guy claimed, the business owner proclaims that it’s a complete failure.
So, what are some common reactions to marketing problems?
A popular solution is to hire an ad agency or get a new one. Maybe the old one isn’t creative anymore – they don’t know how to connect with your customers. Maybe they need to bring in a designer and completely re-brand the image of the company. Maybe we should redo the logo. Maybe we need a fresh brochure or different marketing collateral. Maybe the stuff we’ve got right now just isn’t telling the story anymore.
Or we could bring in a whole new web design company and redo the website.
How about we take out more ads… or different ads… or maybe more, different ads in more and different places?
Maybe we just need to get back to the fundamentals and start randomly calling people to generate leads?
Any and all of these are certainly viable solutions to specific, tactical-level problems.
But without the right kind of marketing process or marketing management system in place, how does any business-owner really know if any of these things are going to be effective or not?
They don’t, because they don’t necessarily know the root of the problem. Each of these reactions by themselves, without any real analysis or framework in which to do any measurement, is putting a band-aid on a symptom.
Yes, you might get it right here and there, but that’s just pure luck, and not by intent or design.