Were You Looking for This?

After what felt like the longest winter since Mastodons were the main snow-blowers, spring may actually arrive. I’m at my “writing window” overlooking a lake, where my workmates force me to stay put once a week until words actually appear. However,

A squadron of bumblebees keeps smashing their little pollen faces into the glass. I look around the room to see if there’s a little honeybee brothel behind me or something. Not one. So I assume they’re either trying to make the editorial or it just feels good. (I imagine there have been late-night antics when this might’ve seemed normal, or even encouraged.)

“Why we do what we do” is why I do what I do. My job is to “change behavior.” Should be your marketing’s job too: To move a customer from not calling you to calling. From leaving you to staying. From complaint to a glowing referral. Here’s how you do that.

People tend to think of marketing as some voodoo-laced experiment by hyper-creatives who cause people to start drooling as they withdraw their credit card. And basically, that IS the mission, except for one thing: The hyper-creatives have numbers to hit, which include ‘budget, time and units sold.’ If not, they find themselves a new job as, I don’t know, the next SEO expert.  

Where Marketing Fails

When a contractor hires ANY company for marketing service, buys ad time or space or does ANY promotion, the following is a very common seed of failure:

Neither the contractor nor the vendor has set clear goals or expectations. And when one or both sides do not “match up” to the undiscussed goal, things fall apart. YOU want marketing and advertising dollars to bring you fast, qualified leads, plus a great image, unshakable retention and a stream of referrals.

But that won’t happen in one ad, one time, on a shoestring budget. Contractors often give up inches from a breakthrough to try “something new.” Vendors – often too eager for a sale – don’t often explain the outcome nor the time it’ll take to reach it.

Return on Marketing Investment can include these “Behavior Changes” –

• Increase annual/seasonal lead count (online, offline, from service dept.)
• To increase searches by company name and NOT by trade. (Trade results are a crapshoot and NO ONE gets “lucky” on Google; it is orchestrated, formulaic; written about it here before.)
• Generate X% more referrals (higher closing ratio and higher ticket average)
• Increase average transaction size by X%
• Generate positive reviews from  X% of customer visits
• To generate X% of business from customer base

Just like those who create marketing, achieving your goals takes a budget, time and a realistic expectation of units sold. (The budget – which gives most contractors fits or causes paralysis – is why we’ve published a Budget Calculator every year for the past 14 years, changing according to emerging trends each year. Click to get yours.

Remember, the BIG goals of marketing and the ONLY ones you should be paying for are: 1. Get Noticed. 2. Get Customers. 3. Be Memorable.  That’s it. We get roughly 8,000 questions a week (but who’s counting!?) that begin with something like, “I was told I should , so how much should I spend on it?”  The answer?

NOT ONE DIME… unless it changes the behavior of YOUR target market to meet YOUR expectations. And those expectations are items 1-3 above, with actual numbers and dates attached. See? Simple.

The “WWIT” Factor of Wealth Diminishment

After spending 14 solid years doing ONLY contractor marketing (and 7 before that while I was pretending to learn it), you begin to notice trends. A big one is where contractors will actually follow a prescribed marketing path for a while, then want something “new, fresh, shiny” and take an abrupt detour to, as is often said, “…go in a different direction.” And a different direction they go, often toward a richly-promised return that is actually a marketing exploration that uses their Visa card for a flashlight.

It is at this point a contractor comes to the WWIT conclusion: “What was I thinking?”

“Popular” Is Not Always Profitable

Go with what works; invest in marketing trends, not fads.

We cautioned every year since 2009 that the HUGE market in Facebook was still a likely negative ROI due to the “we-hate-sales-and-selling” mentality from the top-down.  (Zuckerberg FINALLY conceded to better ad positioning since a ‘frozen’ $24 stock price was not making his life a party. It’s now hovering at $62-65.) Same with Twitter. The “goal” for social media then is NOT direct sales or leads, but lead-nurturing, relationships and referrals. Very different.

Thus, the method (in this one media) to change behavior is to be “advisory” 70% of the time (relationship) and promotional for 30% – and even then – only “introduce” an alluring topic that is linked to your site for the actual promotion. Tread lightly or get slammed socially. (This is why that ratio exists in the PowerSuite Marketing program.)

Nowhere is flippancy of media any more pronounced than in Local Listings, where daily “rule changes” put you in ongoing reaction mode to maintain your ranking. Up one day, down the next, what happened? Hard to change your market’s behavior based on rules that are adjusted behind closed doors, often for entertainment.

So we turned to places we can change behavior instead of respond to it: Online content (which pushes and maintains rank), videos, structured emails, traffic manipulation, DIRECT MAIL and any place we can “push” a message to a real, live, targeted audience. (I put Direct Mail in capital letters, since as our Coaching Members know, this media is making a HUGE comeback and getting terrific results. Use the Direct Response cards and letters as advised in last month’s coaching call.)

So, as you sit back, now one quarter of the way through the year, and begin to adjust your marketing plan, ask HOW to change the behavior in your market, at what price, and how soon?  Anything else is like those bumblebees: lots of noise, zero sting and causing a massive headache.

Adams Hudson