Are There Holes In Your Marketing Bucket?

Imagine you’re standing at the top of the hill in front of the marketing well. With a final turn of the winch the bucket comes up. You take hold of it and find it full to the brim with great marketing ideas. With your bucket in hand you carefully go back down the hill to where your clients are waiting. 

Halfway down the hill you notice the bucket seems a lot lighter. You glance down and find it already half empty. Looking back to the well you see a trail of marketing ideas splashed over the ground. What happened?  There might be some holes in your marketing bucket.

Marketing isn’t one simple thing. It’s an intricate process with various routines that all have to work seamlessly together to attract customers, sell them on your product or service, guide them through the sale and then retain them. A misstep in any one of these processes can mean missed opportunities, lost revenue and spilling precious marketing dollars on the ground.

To start patching these holes, you’ll want to examine your entire marketing process to find where the water is leaking.

You can use complex algorithms, or just some basic ratios. For example, how much of your marketing is getting spilled? Try using a conversion ratio. This ratio is simply the percentage of actual sales you get out of the total number of leads and opportunities for sales you generate. In other words, how much of the water you’re pouring into the bucket is actually going into the bucket?

From there, you can look at more specific problems. Why aren’t the leads you’re generating resulting in more sales? Maybe you’re generating the wrong kinds of leads, or looking for them in the wrong places.

Techniques like this one can help you find the leak and isolate the cause. Now that you’ve found it, how do you plug it? A lot of times the solutions can be as varied as the problem, but here are some tricks that often help plug multiple holes:

• Boost the training for both yourself and for your sales staff. An investment in your sales staff is an investment in your customers and your future business.
• Boost their product knowledge. A good sales staff should know the product they’re selling inside and out and how it’s better for the customer than what the competition has to offer.
• Make your process easy for the customer. The less work they have to put in to purchase something or to ask questions about a product, the more likely they are to buy it and recommend it to their friends. 
• Have a strong follow-up after the sale. It’s cheaper and easier to retain an existing customer than it is to find new ones.

Marketing would be a lot easier if you had an unlimited budget, but you don’t. Find the holes in your marketing bucket and fill them so you can get the most out of your advertising dollars.