Imagine you are faced with the task of joining two pieces of wood.
What information are you likely to need before deciding how to go about the task?
How big and important are the pieces, are they structural weight bearing, is the joint going to be seen, will the choice have a knock-on effect, what is the most efficient joint?
The point is, you need that information before you can then decide how you go about the joining. Do you nail, screw, glue, combine rebate glue and screw, countersink the screw? Without the contextual information, you cannot make an informed decision that will give you the best outcome.
Sometimes this is easy, instantaneous, other times it will require more time and research to get the right answer.
Figuring out your marketing programs is no different.
How are you going to allocate your limited resources across all the possibilities that face you?
Marketing has only one purpose, to generate revenue and resulting margin. Sometimes it is revenue today. Sometimes tomorrow, next month, next year, next decade. If you cannot see a connection between the marketing activity and future revenue, stop now!
The challenge is to know enough to ask informed and intelligent questions and be able to separate the bullshit from the good answers.
This ‘marketing game’ is full of sellers of new shiny toys that are ‘guaranteed’ to be the answer to all your commercial problems, delivering you rivers of cash.
In order to help you separate the bullshit from the reality, there are four questions you can ask to do the separation, which will assist you to see the connections to revenue.
They all are interdependent, none by themselves is of great value, and together they are a powerful way of thinking about your business.
The 4 seem simple at first glance, but in reality, are very complex questions, that in combination will give you the beginnings of an answer. The rest will come with experience and domain knowledge.
- What problem can I solve for a potential customer, or put another way, how do I add value?
- Who is my ideal customer?
- How do I apply maximum marketing leverage?
- How do I make a profit?
When you have the answer to these four questions, you are ready to spend some money.
Not before.
However, once answered, it is never enough to stand still and think the answers tomorrow will be the same as today, and that the answer today is the ideal one. Business is iterative, you learn from doing, experimenting, doing it better next time. It is an evolutionary process, so long as you are careful not to bet the farm on a dud horse. These are all connected to each other, one without the other is of less value, and the impact of answering them all well is not just cumulative, it is compounding.
These four factors, and all the lesser things that hang off them, are compounding.
The twist is that they also compound in reverse, so you must be prepared to try things, but get them off the table quickly when they do not work.
Let me know when I can help.
Header cartoon credit: Tom Gauld www.tomgauld.com
