A husband once asked his wife, "Why do you cut the ends off of a roast before cooking it?"
"Because my mother did it that way," she replied.
Curious, the husband called his mother-in-law and asked her the exact same question, and she gave an identical answer. More intrigued than ever, the man contacted his wife's grandmother and posed the same quandry, after explaining the answer he had received from each previous woman. The elderly woman chuckled and said, "I don't know why THEY cut off the ends of the roast, but I did it that way because all I had was a small pan that a full roast wouldn't fit into."
That amusing story serves to illustrate an important point when it comes to marketing for your business. If you are doing things, taking actions and spending money from your marketing budget on line items for the sole reason of "Because we always allocate money to that, it's always been part of the budget" you might want to rethink things. The moral of the story is clear: some practices are intiated with a purpose, but over time even the best practice can lose its usefulness, and a good leader must know when to reevaulate and make changes. What was a good idea in its day, can become just an exercise in rote, status quo behavior that in the present is really a financial drain or a time waster, neither of which many companies can afford in this day and age. I have frequently told potential clients that when it comes to more effective marketing, after looking at their past 2-3 years of marketing budget figures, that it is not a question of spending more than what they have budgeted, as much as it is reallocating those funds into things, ideas, campaigns and actions that WORK. Sometimes you have to cut loose of marketing tools that may have brought return 5, 10 or 15 years ago but now are bringing in next to nothing in terms of new business, increased revenue streams etc..
Here's a question for you: How long has it been since you did a thorough analysis of your marketing numbers by campaign or tool? When was the last time you sat down and really had good data and analytics to be able to determine how many leads were generated by your marketing efforts, and from there extrapolated how many of those leads were actually closed to see if what you were doing was paying enough for the effort and cost?
Maybe 10-15 years ago running newspaper and yellow page ads were your primary tools for getting the word out about your services, but now your target market segment has migrated to the web. Maybe 5 years ago your website was a basic brochure style site, but now what your clients really want is to be able to interact more conveniently with you 24 hours a day and you lack the functionality. Maybe 1 year ago you scoffed at why on earth any business would waste time dabbling in Facebook, and now the new marketplace for your product resides squarely in that very community. Maybe you have been spending sizable sums on TV ads, when your audience is really tuned into talk radio in their cars and offices. Maybe you are still eating the cost of print and postage for shotgun direct mailers to a wide, untargeted audience when what you should be doing is leveraging Personalized URLs and variable data or dimensional mailing pieces to a tightly focused, smaller group where the cost is higher per piece but the close ratio is exponentially greater.
It's a lot to think about, but thinking about it is exactly what needs to be done, and on a regular basis!
We have a client that has been in business for over 125 years, and after analyzing their last several years worth of marketing campaigns and expenditures and creating a complete marketing strategy for the entire next year the president said, "This is the very first time we have ever actually had a real PLAN for our marketing." There are a lot of companies out there that could probably say the same, and sometimes it takes an outside agency or firm to really look at things from a fresh perspective and give honest feedback about what you are doing and suggest new, more effective directions to move in. Without that, at times, there is a tendency to keep on doing things because it's what you have always done, or "it's just always been a line item in the budget", when in reality you are only doing it out of habit and not for a good reason any more. The roast used to not fit in the pan, but now things have changed and you're still cutting the ends off, so to speak.
Don't get caught in that rut, your business deserves to be on the cutting edge of methods of getting your brand out there, not stuck trying to talk to people and prospects of 15, 5 or even 1 year ago that may or may not even be around any more, or whose needs have changed. Your prospective clients keep moving on with the times, why plant a flag in the past and dig your heels in when it comes to reaching them?
Reviewing your marketing options, directions and motions should be a regular process as should the analysis of your results so course corrections can be made and new revenue streams can be navigated whether you are a Fortune 500 company or a local mom and pop shop.
The pan has changed, maybe your marketing plan should too.
From where you are to where you want to be!
Doug
