Two Killer Questions That Will Give Your Marketing FOCUS (Marketing Series, Part 2)
Which marketing type are you?
Are you the absentee marketer, who thinks marketing should be done when you’ve got nothing else to do?
Are you the procrasti-marketer, the “We’ll do marketing when we have time!” marketer, who almost never has time?
Are you the squealer-marketer? The marketer who squeals over some “cool, new” product in the industry and decides to “send it to all of our customers!”
Or, are you the serial tech-marketer, someone allured by the next shiny app, online tool, or social media platform who hops from channel to channel?
All of these marketers have one thing in common: they have no strategy.
As we discussed in our initial post that kicked off this new series, your marketing, when aligned with a powerful sales strategy is “sales on steroids.” But often, we get channels, tactics, and “cool self-promo” ahead of strategy with no clearly defined purpose. And with no clearly defined purpose, we waste a lot of precious marketing resources (time, talent, and money).
In this industry, there are typically three major marketing problems:
Lack of a distinct, differentiated brand
Lack of a tactical growth strategy for existing clients
Lack of a tactical lead gen strategy for new clients
To create a successful strategy that activates the power of your marketing, you must ask yourself two critical questions, first:
Which, of the big three marketing problems, is your biggest challenge right now?
Sounds like a simple question, but there is power in simplicity and it’s all about focus. The field of marketing is diverse, with so many best-practice tips and tactics, that you can make yourself dizzy trying to wade through all the options or by trying to implement them all at once. Often, even the most astute marketers try to solve too many problems, which usually leads to solving no specific problem at all.
Successful marketers take the time, each year, to analyze their organization’s growth and identify their biggest hurdle when it comes to sales growth, and then map their marketing strategy to boost specific sales success. (For more information on how to develop your sales goals, check out our post How to Set Sales Goals That Hit the Target).
I asked Mark Graham, whom many seek for advice on how to invest in marketing (thanks to his success with their former distributorship RIGHTSLEEVE), how he responds to people when asked where to invest in marketing. Mark said, “Many distributors come to me and claim they have a certain problem, like a lead-gen problem, but when I look at their branding, their position in the market, and their identity, there is nothing that differentiates their brand from anyone else’s, and subsequently, there’s a lot of work that needs to be done on how you go to market before you can master marketing for lead gen or client growth.”
Most marketing problems in our industry stem from an undifferentiated brand, as many distributors look the same, communicate the same, and go to market in exactly the same way as their competition. Brand consolidation, the rise of franchise organizations, and large distributor groups have resulted in the rise of the undifferentiated mass marketer. These larger organizations offer “marketing services” but create marketing solutions that are streamlined for expediency, same-thing-to-everyone. Easy access to cheap websites and look-alike resources in our industry make it quick and convenient to build a “brand,” but result in copy-cat marketing. Distributors who resign their marketing to others adopt cookie-cutter approaches to marketing and it can lead to one of the primary sources of their problem growing sales. Shortcuts to identity have created an undifferentiated approach to sales in our industry, furthering the myth (in the end-buyer’s mind) that all distributors are the same, and that swag is at best a commodity and at worse, spam. When your marketing looks like you’ll sell anything to anyone, you are meaningful to nobody.
In the consumer world, big-box retailers tried to sell everything to everyone and ended up spreading themselves too thin, which is leading to the collapse of the big box retailer and the undifferentiated brand; while the rise of boutique independents -from bookstores, to coffee shops, to fashion boutiques- speaks to something hyper-targeted, tribal, and inspiring.
Brands like twelveNYC, Anthem Branding, Fairware, and Brand Aid, Inc., each have worked hard at developing a distinguishable brand presence with a unique position in the market. At one point in their history, each of these brands decided to carve themselves out from the pack and build a business with intention, pulling themselves away from the plethora of look-alike companies that lead to commoditization. They each have a distinct tone, voice, position, and personality, their brands are infused with emotion, and (this is the key) they serve a specific clientele (a niche or segment) and celebrate their success with those clients through their marketing. In so doing, like-attracts-like: other prospects become attracted to them through their successful stories (marketing). While the average distributor’s marketing is product-centric and purposeless, these brands know their market and therefore are customer-centric, and since they know exactly who they are talking to, their messages are imbued with meaning. Memo Kahan, President and owner of Promoshop, spoke at skucon and put it in this context: “Would you buy from yourself? Why?”
First, identify whether the lack of a unique, undifferentiated brand is your primary problem. Before you can fix your lackluster client growth problem or your lack of new leads, you must differentiate your brand. (For inspiration on how to do this, see our list of resources below).
The second question that you must ask in order to create a successful marketing strategy is:
What percentage of our marketing resources (time, talent, and money) should be allocated to resolving our primary problem?
For example, if your problem is that you have an undifferentiated brand, to solve this, it’s going to require an investment of your resources. Since this is the problem you need to fix first, you might decide that 50% of your allocated marketing budget should be spent this year on solving that problem. That 50% might involve multiple options: hiring a marketing rep, hiring an agency to rebuild or enhance your brand, contracting with a consultant, building a new web presence, etc. Fixing your primary problem will require your primary resources. This focus on one problem also helps direct your marketing team on where to allocate their time and attention.
A quick note on marketing budget: There are many conflicting pieces of advice on how much a business should spend on marketing, some experts advise upwards of 10% of your gross profit and others, like the Small Business Administration, recommends 2-3% of projected gross revenues, or 3-5% of gross revenues if you're a start-up or in high-growth mode. The problem with general statistics is that these numbers encompass a variety of industries and may not be a true reflection of what’s required in our industry. In my work as a former distributor, we would spend anywhere from 3%-6% of the gross profit, depending on the year and our strategy (a new web property for example, or hiring more sales people might result in a higher percentage).
For those who have already developed a differentiated brand, the same logical question “Where should we focus?” applies.
Your problem might be either qualified new business leads or slower-than-expected existing business growth. When I was a distributor, we did the hard work of creating a differentiated brand that specialized in our UVP (shops). Once we had that specific marketing problem resolved, we knew we then needed to work on increasing our lead gen, so we began to double-down on content like blogs and ebooks and our social presence, creating a landing page with questions for prospects, etc. Our primary marketing resources, i.e., our money but primarily the focus of our energy, was now diverted to a new goal: lead-gen.
The bottom line is, your marketing strategy should always be about focus and intent: focus on solving a specific problem with intention. And it’s a tired cliché but true that marketing is a marathon, not a sprint. Some months, you may need to invest deeply in your brand before you can even begin to invest in your sales funnel. Some months, you may have a fully active sales funnel with incoming leads, but you might need to spend more time on quality leads. And in every season, marketing to your existing customers is always the right way to spend your resources (more on that in a subsequent post).
Our next two posts will talk about the second and third major marketing problems: lack of a tactical client growth strategy and lack of tactical lead gen strategy, plus the tools and resources to amp both!
For more resources on how to create a differentiated brand, check out: