MARKETING TOOLBOX
WHY YOUR MARKETING DOESN’T WORK AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT
Have you ever had a marketing campaign fail? I know I have many times, and it sucks. All that time and money invested goes up in smoke. There are dozens of reasons that campaigns don’t work, and I could write an article going over things like the offer, media choice, etc., but I don’t think that’ll be super helpful. Instead, I want to focus more on you and your business and what is happening internally that could be causing your campaigns to fail. My hope is that this will be a new way for you to evaluate campaign success and failures. A dentist called us recently and told us a new- homeowner direct-mail campaign we were doing for their office wasn’t working. I asked why, and they didn’t know. So I asked for permission to mystery call his office. A few hours later, I grabbed the phone and called the office, and I got their voicemail. I hung up, waited 2 minutes, and tried again. On the fourth call, someone finally answered, and when I asked for an appointment as a new patient, she couldn’t get me in for three weeks. No wonder the marketing wasn’t working — they were understaffed at the front desk, and the receptionist was poorly trained. Most businesses live and die by the phones, but do nearly zero training for the employees on phone skills. They also typically don’t pay the people who answer the phones very well, which is one of the reasons they don’t get employees with phone skills. This is a huge mistake. You must have scripting for your phones. If you make appointments or sales, you need to pay those people a good wage or commission and give them training, not just throw them to the wolves on day one. The next issue I see on a regular basis is that people are not clear about the goals for their campaigns. Let me use a newsletter example for this point. If you want more referrals, simply sending a newsletter will get the vast majority of businesses more referrals. Newsletters give you top-of-mind awareness and have pass-around value. But if you want 25 more referrals per month, simply sending a newsletter won’t do the trick. You need to promote referrals in the newsletter and
climbing if you want to get more and more fruit. You have to do the same thing with marketing. Today you may be able to get 10 new customers for $100 each, but if you want to get 20 new customers, you may have to spend $135 each for customers 11–15, and $157 each for customers 16–20. For the first 10 customers, you may be able to close all of them via the internet and email, but for the next 10, you’ll have to get on the phone. It simply gets more and more difficult as you want to get more and more customers. This is why so many settle and stop trying to grow. I know none of what I just told you is likely to be what you wanted to hear, but it is the truth. And right now, these three areas are holding many people back from achieving their dreams. The question is, are these areas going to hold you back? Are you willing to do the work and make changes to how you run your business? Will you stop blaming the marketing for all the failures and, instead, look at internal issues that may be causing them? Only time will tell.
ask for them when you’re talking to customers. Best-case scenario, you should have a referral promo or contest. If you can’t do that, you have to create a referral culture and offer information that is valuable to help get more referrals. Unless you’re clear on the goals you want (and for the record, saying, “I want more customers” is not being clear), how can anyone help you achieve these goals? Finally, most people vastly underestimate how difficult it is to grow. It’s hard to get a new customer today, and it’s expensive. All of this new media is actually making it more expensive and difficult for the vast majority of businesses. Far too many people get their business going, start marketing, find some success, and then expect to get customers for the same amount of money and effort they are spending today — and that simply isn’t reality. As you scale, you have to spend more money to continue getting the same results. It’s like picking fruit from a tree. At first, it’s easy, but eventually you have to grab a ladder and start
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