Take Action

Last week I talked about asking some hard questions. Hopefully, you had a chance to do that. If not…look at these questions again. Click here to read them.

If you had a good quarter and the answers to these questions are all positive, then congratulations. But I have a feeling that most of you received less than stellar answers. So now…what do we do about it?

Here are a couple of options on what NOT to do.

1. DON’T keep doing what you have been and expect the results to change.
2. DON’T let another day go by without putting the systems in place to ensure you actually GET answers to these questions.
3. DON’T downplay the importance of tracking, and remember that it's actually a good idea to track on a more micro level in the beginning.

Here are a couple of action steps you can take TODAY.

1. Get a plan together, even if it's an outline sketched out on a napkin.
2. Define the tasks required to put the plan into action TODAY and assign them to individuals.
3. Give them a deadline for when their tasks have to be completed and set an expectation that they must report back to you at that time.
4. To create the plan, you have to have a goal in mind, like the number of leads needed over the course of the year to hit your revenue objective. Then you can do some basic math to create the marketing tactics needed to deliver this goal. For more on that…visit this link.

More on this tomorrow. If in the meantime, you need some advice or counsel, please feel free to email me directly at mike@square2marketing.com.

Square 2 Marketing—helping business owners.

Take Care Of Your Team

I am going to get back to the key questions blog post from a couple of weeks ago, but let me pause today to comment on how important it is to take care of your team.

We took last Thursday evening and took the entire company to see the Blue Man Group in a Super Box at the Wachovia Center. We wanted to WOW! our team, so we took care of everything, transportation, drinks, food, tickets (in the box) and even a parting gift at the end of the evening. The team had a blast and everyone was WOWed by our desire to do something like that for them.

I highly recommend making sure you take time to really show your team how important they are to you and how their hard work directly translates into an opportunity to do fun, interesting, and “remarkable” experiences. It’s my hope that as we grow, we can continue to do WOW! Events like this and that they will only get bigger and better. Try it with your team as soon as you can.

Here is one of the many pictures from the night. If you have any other ideas on how to WOW your teams, reach out to me and let me know.

http://square2marketing.com/images/company_wow.jpg

Square 2 Marketing—helping business owners.

How Are You Doing?

No, I don’t want to really know how you are doing. But I do want you to consider how your marketing programs are doing. The first quarter is over and we need to take an objective look at your marketing investment portfolio, just like you monitor stock or mutual fund portfolios.

Here are a couple of questions for you to ask your VP of Marketing, your marketing consultant, or yourself…if you handle all the marketing.

1. What were our expectations or goals for leads generated in the 1^st quarter?
2. How many leads did our marketing programs actually generate in the first three months of 2007?
3. How many leads did each of the individual tactics generate?
4. How much did each of those leads cost? What was our average cost per lead?
5. Which programs were top performing? Which ones were at the bottom?
6. How do we need to change the allocation of investment dollars to improve performance in the 2^nd quarter?
7. Did we hit our sales targets? Did we even have sales targets?
8. If we hit our lead targets, but not our sales targets, why didn’t we make our sales numbers?
9. How many new email addresses did we add to our email/prospect database?
10. Did the traffic to our website increase this quarter? By how much?

If your marketing team cant answer these questions. You should consider getting more involved in marketing, or bringing in a new team.

If you would like to know how some of our clients did on these questions, just email me. I will share some of their results anonymously, of course. But we track this each this each quarter for them.

Square 2 Marketing—helping business owners.

Doctors of Marketing

We work with hundreds of clients at Square 2 Marketing. Most of them thrive and achieve their business goals, but as you would imagine, not all of them result in positive outcomes. So, in my quest to continuously improve our firm, I have to know: what makes the difference between success and failure with our clients?

This is what I came up with over the weekend. We are just like doctors. Our clients (you can think of them as patients) come to us with businesses that are stagnant, declining, or not growing fast enough (you can think of them as sick businesses).

Some of our clients have major issues, like being in a declining industry (you can think of these as terminally ill businesses or those that can’t be helped through marketing). While this is rare, it does happen. More often, our clients have business that are great and can achieve greatness through marketing (you can think of these as sick businesses, but with a specific course of treatment are able to recover and go on to live long and successful lives for their owners.)

Just like when you go to a doctor, our first step is to ask a lot of questions. We do this to proper diagnose the illness, or issues facing our clients’ businesses. After we make a diagnosis, we recommend a course of treatment. Sometimes, that course of treatment is radical, requiring a business owner to think differently about their business so as to allow us to help that business shine.

At this point, our patients or clients are at a crossroads. They can take our advice and execute our treatment plan, or they can ignore our advice and continue on as they have in the past. Sometimes, our clients think they know better and actually implement what they think will work, basically treating themselves and prescribing themselves the medication necessary to heal their businesses. Sounds silly, right? You would be surprised.

Our firm has treated hundreds of businesses, and those that implement our treatment plans (marketing recommendations, programs, tactics, projects) have all gone on to reach new heights. Those that don’t head our advice typically languish with the same issues they had before we met them, basically never getting better.

You wouldn’t go to a doctor, ask them to examine you, diagnose your condition, recommend a course of treatment and a prescription just to ignore their advice because you know better, would you?

Whether you work with us or another marketing consultant, don’t make the same mistake.

Square 2 Marketing—helping business owners.

Rage Against The Machine

A few more tips on how to get your message out there despite the overcrowded airwaves and less than interested prospect base.

1. Never give up. Persistence in messaging and ongoing communication is critical to catching that prospect when they need your product or service. The trick is to be educational. If you are helping people, you aren’t selling and now you are a valuable resource.
   
   
2. In your mission to be persistent, you must also be regular and rhythmic. People want to be able to digest your information on their timetable at their discretion.
   
   
3. Deliver your information in accessible, bite-sized chunks. As a marketer, that means sending your message in a highly targeted and affordable medium, like email or RSS feed updates. This tactic achieves both of the above items and does so in an extremely affordable fashion, typically 1 or 2 cents per name per month.
   

For more information on how to use email marketing to grow your customer base, visit our Free Resources section of this site. It's packed with tips and techniques to improve the performance of your marketing with email programs.

Let me know how it works for you.

Square 2 Marketing—helping business owners.

More Bad News

So most Americans are numb to all the advertising out there. Here are a couple of more startling facts. At any give time, just 3% of your prospects are currently in the market to buy your product or service and actively looking right now. Another 6% to 7% are actually open to the idea, but not actively looking. The remaining 90% of your target market are divided into three categories.

• Not really thinking about what you do right now
• Think they’re not interested (but might be open to something really special)
• Know they aren’t interested, even a little.

If you are feeling depressed about the chances of actually getting a sale, you aren’t alone. It's tough out there. It’s literally impossible to break through the clutter and be lucky enough stumble upon the one or two people actually interested in hearing about your company.

How do we improve our odds? It’s easy!

1. Be remarkable in every aspect of your business. If that seems daunting, start with one area and work on improving one thing each day. Over time, people will be buzzing about your business.
   
   
2. Stop marketing your business like everyone else. Try new things that target only the few people who actually want your product or service right now. While it sounds simple, you would be surprised at how many people put advertisements in the newspaper simply because their competition does. Guess what? They are as confused as you are. Don’t follow them blindly.

More tips in my next post.

Square 2 Marketing—helping business owners.