One of the things that so many companies experience is losing their shirts in well-intentioned marketing programs. This leads to a feeling of hopelessness, at times, for particular types of marketing.
In fact, there are ways to ensure you keep that shirt on, and in fact succeed to a point where you can get your tie, cuff links, and blazer as well. Here’s how:
- Plan
- Prioritize
- Measure
- Partner
Plan: The first step to avoid losing your shirt is to effectively plan. When people “lose their shirts” in a bet, it’s often because they didn’t effectively plan the bet, weighing the risks and the cost.
While I hate to say marketing is like a bet, it is far from a sure thing, often requiring testing and trialing to find just the right things that will work. By knowing your goals, and planning your sales funnel effectively, including the strategy to nurture leads into sales, you’ll be well on your way to gaining marketing success.
Prioritize: There are many things you probably should be doing in your marketing efforts. However, unless you are independently wealthy you’ll need to prioritize those things that come first and then those things that you should test later.
The point is to have a planned and staged approach for what you’ll test, and a defined test to provide enough bandwidth to achieve success, but also small enough that you won’t waste resources on things that aren’t working.
Measure: For any marketing to be effective, you must be able to measure and tell if it’s performing. Whether this is measuring traffic to a site, purchases made, online requests, or calls to your company, you must be able to understand the impact of the program.
If you’re running a multi-channel campaign, building effective attribution models. This is especially true if you’re operating in a complex sales environment, where sales may not be made on the first contact. Tracking back the component of the sales funnel shows you what needs to be improved.
Partner: Unless you’re working for a marketing agency already, you are probably reading the above list and wondering where you’ll fit this is with your already booked schedule trying to run your business as well as deliver your products and services.
Choosing the correct marketing partner may be the single most important component of keeping your shirt on. You not only need a company who can effectively deliver tactics, but one who shares your strategic mindset for your business.
