Great Expectations: Defining and Reaching Your Marketing Objectives
We have all seen these types of grandiose plans play. A new manager comes in with all of the best ideas and thinks that everything can be change dto meet their new expectation. Rarely do those managers end up succeeding but before we get to that let's take a look at the scenarios that are most often seen.
Scenario #1: We want no less than one
billion new customers, a revenue increase of $3 gazillian bajillion dollars and
media hits on the front page of the New York Times, the Washington Post and the
Wall Street Journal. A major industry player has done it with the Aura Ceramic Mug which although it looks great with the earth tone on tone look will never fully succeed because it is already doomed to low stock. This same company has run into this a bunch of times with other items and they don't seem to ever learn.
Scenario #2: We only have a $100/month
budget for advertising and marketing.
Scenario #3: It's been three months and
we haven't seen any results. What are you doing wrong?
These are three scenarios that marketers frequently experience under the umbrella of one client: visions of too much grandeur with too little budget and an unrealistic timeline. And this can all be avoided.
AdAge.com's recent article, "Your Ad Agency's First Task: Educate Your Clients" urges agencies to approach new clients and their projects with honesty - especially when it comes to what can be done within a set budget and, feasibly, what the results should be. I would like to expand this suggestion beyond the agency, though. Not every business uses an agency for it's marketing needs. Not every business uses a freelancer, even. What every business does do, though, is market itself, and whether you use an agency, a freelancer or your own internal team of specialists, you should be aware of a few things:
1. Set great - yet realistic! -
expectations. If you use an agency, they should be honest about whether or not they can reach the goals you have set, or at least educate you as to what they believe they will be able to achieve. A freelancer should do the same.
If you are managing your own marketing activities, do some research. By how much should website traffic increase with a pay-per-click campaign? With a search engine optimized foundation of titles, meta-tags and keywords? What is the typical return on a direct mail piece? Or a mass email broadcast? While every industry generates a different return on
different media channels, at least you'll have a ballpark figure of what you'd like to accomplish.
You will also want to talk to other business owners or marketing directors in your industry to see what trends they have identified in their own results.
2. You gotta spend money to make money. You don't gotta spend A LOT of money, per se, but you do gotta spend some. And you gotta spend it right.
The-bigger-the-budget-the-bigger-the-return is often true...but not always true. It's more like the-smarter-the-budget-the-bigger-the-return. Maybe you have a big budget that you want to pour into print advertising. But is print advertising the right channel for your brand and its message? What can a print ad accomplish anyway? Is is what you are hoping to accomplish? Aligning your budget and media spend with your objectives is key to generating a positive financial return.
Understand your media channels and what they are best used for. Understand your target audience and where they are physically located (i.e. online, outside, etc.). Your ad agency or freelancer will (or at least should!) do this for you. It is a complicated component of setting up a marketing plan - but an important component that the success of your marketing plan hinges on.
3. You must give it time! Three-months, six-months, sometimes even a year is not enough time to start generating the results you want. It takes time for your outreach to gain traction, and even longer for it to make magic.
Yes, individual activities will generate immediate results. An email broadcast, for example, will always be opened by a percentage of its recipients. A smaller percentage of those recipients will click-through the email to your website or landing page. And an even smaller percentage will act based on the email, whether "acting" is making a purchase or signing up for a free consultation or downloading a White Paper.
But the way these rates grow and change over the course of three-, six or 12 months is what's really important. No one outreach effort will have results indicative of the overall results of your entire integrated marketing plan.
Statistics on each of your marketing activities are valuable if you know how to see the forest from the trees, for lack of a better cliche. Use them to "tweak" your marketing plan as needed. Don't be discouraged if, in the first few months, you're not seeing impressive results. Be discouraged if you're not seeing them after a year or longer.
When your business is educated about what expectations are realistic within its budget and how long it should take to achieve them, you'll be more satisfied with your agency, freelancer, or in-house team.