It occurs to you one day while you’re at the office, a repetitive series of thoughts that go something like:
“I wonder how I’ll reach my yearly goals!”
And on it goes.
This should not be. You are a smart person with great ideas about leadership and customer service. Your aim has always been to go beyond what you’re competitors are doing.
So what gives? Why are you not seeing some positive results from your website, email, blog, white papers, etc?
Your marketing has gotten LAZY.
Now don’t misunderstand: You are NOT lazy, you’re marketing just:
L acks sales connection,
A lways changes, shows
Z ero buyer love, and
Y anks out conversation
Let’s talk about it
Why are you not seeing some positive results from your website, email, blog, white papers, etc?
Your marketing has gotten lazy.
HOW TO AVOID LAZY MARKETING IN ORDER TO BUILD AN ATTRACTIVE SALES MACHINE
L for lacks sales connection
Years back, when I first reared my head into the world of internet marketing, I had the quaint thought that I’d promote myself on Twitter, for it was hot.
I sat there over my laptop finding new ways to say “improve web traffic…ooh…boost your search rankings” over and over. Then I did a little search–only to find that thousands of people claimed they could do the same thing.
But what would be the purpose of all that traffic? Back in their minds, and probably yours, when managers want to improve traffic, what they’re really saying is: “I want to improve sales.”
Again. “I want to increase my web traffic” = “I want to improve my sales.”
“I want to improve my click through rate” = “I want more people to buy my services.”
Yet with so much pent-up aggression around sales, how often do marketers, marketing managers, and people who use some version of “marketing” in their official title make the connection between marketing and money? By what I see on the regular, not often enough.
If you want money, you want sales. And its connection with your marketing needs to be tighter than politicians and paid lobbyists.
Sales gets a bad rap. It can bring up images of slimy characters cold-calling doctors and garbage men Boiler Room style and beating people into submission with words. But that has changed. The internet has made it more of an equal playing field for buyers and sellers.
Instead of sellers hoarding information until (and only until) buyers pony up the cash, buyers are getting much of their information from these same folks free and (only) then choose to contact the sales department.
I’ve heard it said over and over these days, by the time buyers come to your door they’re nearly 70 percent sold.
Today’s salesperson has become an educator and consultant, which is really blurring the line between marketing and sales.
Hubspot calls it “Smarketing”—so let’s go with that term.
In smarketing, the marketing and sales teams are more like buddies in an open-concept office. They share ideas, strategies, and goals regularly; no walls between ‘em.
Because of this über transparency, marketing and sales have to come up with their own shared language, so they may understand each other.
This means that a hybrid smarketing team will have to decide specifically what a “prospect” and “lead” are. But generally, this is how the smarketing funnel would look.
Beyond that, the best smarketing teams work out a Sales and Marketing SLA (Service-Level-Agreement). This is a way for both sides of the team to know what is expected of them. Marketing gets to work out how many prospects/visitors, leads, and marketing-qualified leads they need to give sales so they can go about and make that money.
This keeps the marketing team focused on goals that actually matter (and allow people to keep their jobs).
This also serves to redirect marketing from efforts that sound good for awards committees today but won’t cut the money mustard tomorrow.
A for always changes
Marketing is like working out, you can’t expect anything to happen without a bit of consistency.
I once sat down with a respected marketing leader from a top firm and had the chance to ask him a few questions as to where marketing, as a field, was headed.
With over 20 years of experience at his disposal, he explained one of the biggest struggles we’re facing is obsession with the new shiny thing.
“You look around for the best tool to solve a problem—you find one and it solves it well. It’s new, so you learn how to use it and develop your product with it. Then the person you hand it to says,
‘Oh that’s old, here’s the new thing. Mind you, the service you used has only been around eight months!”
I understand the struggle, as you probably do.
Here’s what I’m saying:
This is not about slamming new and better tech, instead it’s all about accountability.
Often, you come across a client who wants to do something they believe will increase visits, then conversions, then revenue. And they want to start right away. In the past, I would hop-to, produce the materials for their envisioned campaign and run back breathlessly.
Inevitably, a week of this new direction would bore them (they aren’t seeing numbers skyrocket and hearing angels sing) and they set-up a meeting to talk change in direction.
Here is the trouble with that:
- We don’t know why the last campaign didn’t work: Was it me? Did we aim it using the wrong audience? Did we use the wrong channel?
- We will make the same dumb mistake again.
I call this “Entering through the Exit Door”:
Picture this: you’ve come up to your friendly department store, Penny Pete’s, and you try to enter from the first door you find.
It cracks open a bit and slams in your face. You do this a few more times and it’s just not working.
You peer through that store glass window and check out all the customers giving each other high-fives for finding deals of a lifetime, magical décor, and smiling faces eagerly waiting to greet you. So instead of trying one of the hundred doors available…
You go back to your car and say, “Screw this store!”
Doesn’t make sense, does it?
In marketing, we often find ourselves entering through the exit door. We have some great ideas then we get a helping of reality.
And what is this situation reality shouting at us? Use another door!
Don’t dump your entire content strategy just because you haven’t met your required page rank in two weeks. Instead of scrapping things and making humongous changes, think about how you can make things work a little better with small changes.
If you don’t, how can you ever say with confidence that you know what’s working and what isn’t?
Z for Zero Buyer Love
Many of us develop our marketing campaigns as if we weren’t interacting with people. We’ve all been guilty of it.
Tell me if this sounds familiar: you sit down with the task you have to complete at hand, your company narrative swirling around your brain –and it really inspires you. This marketing piece is going to kill: you’ve unearthed some related notes you swiped from a similar successful Fortune 500 endeavor, you know the color, font sizes, plus all the kick-ass slogans you’ll use. All the tools are ready for use.
But one thing is missing: one teeny-tiny bit you neglected to consider—the buyer. Where is the buyer love?
Now you might believe you aren’t ignoring buyers with your marketing. However, are they central to every piece you create?
I’m not talking about vague crappy ideas like “being human,” “making friendly jabs,” or “being real,” I’m talking about keeping your buyer’s persona and buyer’s journey at the core of your marketing strategy.
Your buyer persona:
You know this already, I’m sure. But with the plethora of crap we commit to with marketing, it’s easy to forget: when you develop a marketing piece of anything, you need to check it against your ideal buyer personas.
Aaron Ross and Marylou Tyler, writing in their book, Predictable Revenue, lament that even accomplished business folk overlook this basic fact:
“If your sales or lead generation efforts are struggling, first look to yourself. How clear is your Ideal Customer Profile? Have you identified their core challenges? Are you marketing to and speaking to those ideal clients, or are you speaking to too broad an audience, and diluting your voice?”
Executives hate to do this because they feel like they are shrinking their market opportunity…”
Your buyers matter, so focusing on their needs first and foremost is the name of this game.
You remember how to build a buyer persona, you review your ideal customer’s
- Background
- Demographics
- Identifiers
- Challenges
- Common Objections
- Real Quotes
Then you ask
- How Can I Help?
As an example, here’s one I recently created for a client:
Buyer Persona: Remote Worker Richard
Background:
- 4 year College-educated
- Mid-High level designer/marketer
- Slightly Skews single/unmarried
- Short stint in corporate world <2 years
Demographics:
- Skews male, 25 to 35
- Income: $40K to 80K
Indentifiers:
- Podcast listeners
- Into humor writing
- Reads Reddit
- Up to date on current internet memes
- DIY Attitude
- Not into small talk, likes purposeful talk
Challenges:
- Feeling left out, neglected
- Working different time zones from team mates, really early mornings
- Might be concerned about job security
How I can help:
- Flexible scheduling, any time of day, 24/7 access
- Provide connection to a team and community
- Help them build network to improve security
Common Objectives:
- Don’t want to pay monthly expenses (but companies pay for it)
- Don’t want to deal with hassle of parking/driving
- People want to project the image of a remote professional office
Real Quotes
“I have to travel a lot”
“Don’t see my team mates”
What to focus on:
We can’t focus on everything equally even though we’d like to, so we’ll need to prioritize. If you only have 50 seconds to draw something insightful from the buyer persona you’ve created, look at the challenges. For they always give you something to solve through your marketing materials.
Other than looking over your buyer persona, you’ll want to develop this piece of buyer love as well…
Your buyer journey:
Again, you probably know this, but your ideal buyers will not arrive to you in the same state. Think about visiting a hardware store for a moment. Depending upon the amount of reading done, personal experience, and aptitude, we each enter into hardware stores at different stages.
- Some of us enter with our hardhats and tool belts around our waists, ready to make a decision. We know exactly what we need and how much.
- Others are sure of our specific problem but not how to fix. We’re all about consideration and exploring solutions.
- Then there are us poor souls who know there’s something funny going on with our house but have no clue what or how to fix it. Here we have a general awareness of the problem.
Your buyers fall into these same categories:
- Awareness: “This situation’s not great. Why?”
- Consideration: “I know the problem. What now?”
- Decision: “I know the solution. I’m ready to act!”
When we forget that this buyer journey exists, we tend to favor one of the stages exclusively. If your focus is money (imagine that, in business!) we tend to create glorified ads and call them blog posts and content marketing.
If I got five dollars for every company that came to me with nothing but “Guess what? We’ve got a new product to buy!” posts, I’d be giving Peter Thiel a run for it.
Develop content for each stage of the buyer journey to help guide your customers to the logical conclusion of their journey: your solution.
Y for yanks out conversation:
There are 2 meanings to explore here.
1:
Ever been to a really bad talk or presentation? I’m sure the problem wasn’t the content or even the where the talk was held but the speaker’s ability to create a dialogue. No dialogue and people have no reason to engage. And if people have no reason to engage, what reason is there to care?
In order to get a marketing plan off the ground, there’s loads of planning to do (as you can see). So it’s understandable when marketers run campaigns with little room for feedback. What do buyers know?
Well buyers (presumably) know what they want to buy. And at the very least, they can tell you when your aim is terribly off. You’re likely familiar with common ways to receive feedback already: surveys, polls, and those plus-sign popups awkwardly placed on the page you’re browsing.
But Hotels.com recently did something interesting with email. I’m not into giving feedback on anything: my review are few. The main issue is I tend to see it as a waste of time. So how did Hotels.com get me to give my feedback?
They made it (seem) super-simple: I received a plain email with a smiley and frowny face. All I had to do was click on either picture to let them know I felt about my recent hotel experience.
On the pages that came up, they asked for details. And since I had already come that far, I gave in. Robert Cialdini would have said I fell into the consistency and commitment trap. I would say that I appreciated Hotels.com recognized the onus wasn’t all on me and that they could lubricate the process a bit. It’s obvious they’re marketing is a conversation with their buyers.
I, as a buyer, like being included in the marketing process. Don’t you?
It’s why some businesses and services seem to improve in time while others feel stuck in some warp. Also, this allows you to tie into the realm of using your service (what your business actually does or produces) as marketing. One of my inspirations, John Winsor, in his book “Baked In” essentially explains the best marketing is “baked” into the very products we use.
2:
Speaking of having conversations with your buyers, here’s a bold idea: why not talk to them every once in a while? I’m talking about getting them on the phone and hearing their elated or frustrated voices on the other end.
Why would I suggest such a thing?
When you look at businesses kicking butt in sales these days, they are including use of the telephone as part of their current sales strategy. This is not the 80s where Wolves of Wall Street call up unsuspecting folks to pressure them, this is your organization using the CRM technology to talk to folks ready to pull the trigger on your product.
In fact, Chris Smith, co-founder of Curaytor, the marketing and sales coaching company writes in The Conversion Code:
100X Rule:
If a company attempts phone contact within five minutes after lead submission, the odds that the lead is contacted are 100 times greater than if it is contacted 30 minutes after submission.
Some great material in this area includes The Conversion Code by Chris Smith and Predictable Revenue by Aaron Ross and Marylou Tyler.
KEEP YOUR MARKETING CONTENT FIT AND FOCUSED
As with most things, it’s easy to get discouraged with the practice of marketing and figure that it just doesn’t work–but that’s all it is—discouragement. Instead of planning how to drop away from marketing in general, why not get more specific about what you want it to do for you.
To see results you can be proud of, you’ll need marketing that:
- Connects to your sales (such as materials for waking up your pipeline)
- Remains fairly consistent for testing/experimenting purposes
- Loves on your buyers as much as you so and
- Keeps the buyer conversation alive