At some point, most businesses want to grow. And that means more clients.
This leads to the inevitable conclusion that to get more clients, you have to do more marketing so you have more leads to sell to.
But all too often, ‘doubling your marketing impact’ comes at a high price – particularly for growing small businesses. The cost is financial and mental – more money than planned is spent and more time and effort than you have to give is dedicated to achieving that result.
But it doesn’t have to be like that.
In this marketing insights article, we show you what you need to do to double your marketing impact – without doubling your marketing stress.
Create marketing clarity
Like the foundations of a building that are hidden away, marketing clarity is essential if you want to build your business up and out. Marketing clarity means knowing what marketing to do, when and why. And like a building’s foundations, it sounds so simple: dig a hole, pour in concrete. Nothing that carries the weight of something built to last is that easy.
Design your marketing foundations
You have to purposefully design your marketing foundations so your entire business can sit on them and grow and grow and grow. This means:
- Choosing key segments to focus on and put at the heart of your marketing – ditch this idea of ‘Everyone needs our products, so we should go after everyone’. Focus on the segments that are the best fit – that you are best set up to deliver to and who give you the most profit.
- Knowing why your clients should choose you over all the other options available to them – then design your marketing around reinforcing this competitive market position.
- Choosing the right martech (marketing technology) for now and the future – choose the materials for your marketing foundations so they can be built on to whatever size you want to get to.
Create a marketing and sales pipeline that doesn’t leak
Too often, companies do this basic equation:
Our goal is to double our revenue by doubling our number of clients. This means we need to double the number of leads we get. Which means we need to double the number of people in our database.
Doubling your database can be daunting and takes time, particularly if you want to be sure you are getting your key customer segments into your database.
The real equation you should be doing starts with the question:
How many of our ideal customers come into our marketing and sales pipeline and leak out?
How many get onto your marketing database but never become a lead?
What happens if you improve this conversion rate by 10%?
How many of your key customer segments become leads but never buy?
What happens if you improve this conversion rate by 10%?
How many become customers but never give you repeat business, recommendations or referrals?
What happens if you improve this conversion rate by 10%?
When you start to look at having a marketing and sales pipeline that doesn’t leak, you start to see that you don’t need to double your database numbers to achieve growth.
But how do you do this? How do you get this non-leaky marketing and sales pipeline? You design it.
Design your marketing and sales pipeline
This is the structure that your marketing and sales takes. You have your foundations. Now, you need to create a sales and marketing pipeline that doesn’t leak, and then build it.
So, you need to carefully think about every marketing and sales activity that has to take place at each stage of the pipeline.
The goal is simple: keep your ideal customer segment with you on the journey, giving them what they want and need at each stage so they stay with you.
The execution is more complicated because, like building a house, everything has to fit together to create one great result.
On weeks four and five of our Marketing Pipeline Programme, we show our attendees how to choose the right marketing and sales activities for each stage of the pipeline.
And how to make sure that they all link together smoothly so that your ideal customer moves through your marketing and sales pipeline with ease and pleasure.
This design work is possible on weeks four and five of our five-week Marketing Pipeline course because by then they understand who their target audiences are and what they need at each stage of the pipeline.
Our attendees can then purposefully design their marketing and sales pipeline, building it up with marketing and sales activities that will work. That keep their ideal clients with them.
We then put budget, resource and time requirements to these activities.
By the time you have done this you finish with:
- A clear, planned, documented step by step plan for what needs to happen at each stage of your marketing and sales pipeline.
- A Marketing and Sales Plan eg ‘Do X at Y time’
- Knowing what money, people and time you need to set up and run this plan.
Now, you need to build your marketing machine. The one that will allow you to double your marketing impact – without doubling your marketing stress.
Build your designed pipeline
You are probably building on top of something that is there already – an existing marketing and sales plan. This plan is what you are ‘running’ now – the marketing and sales building that doesn’t work. The one that doesn’t allow you to grow. If you want to build your designed pipeline, at some point you will have to ‘switch off’ or ‘consume’ your current one.
Let’s run with the building analogy. Very few people knock down their existing building and completely rebuild an ideal, fit for purpose new build. Instead, they look at what they already have in place and think, ‘How can we use this to form part of our fit for purpose design? What do we need to compromise on? Is that too big a compromise? Should we just ditch it?’
When it comes to building your designed, purpose built, fit for purpose marketing and sales pipeline, make wise decisions about what to keep and what to ditch.
Ask yourself: what happens if we keep this?
- Will it stop our growth?
- Will it slow down doubling our marketing impact?
- Will it increase our stress levels?
If the answer is, ‘Yes’, then remove it. Drop the legacy stuff and replace it with your purpose-built design.
Run, run, run
Your foundations are in place. Your marketing and sales pipeline has been built – and you’re confident it’s leak proof. Now, run it. Turn it all on. And wait. Wait to see where those cracks appear. Correct them. Improve them. And watch as the results come in.
As you double your marketing impact. And then one day, you will realise: we know what marketing to do, when and why and we have set up the system to do it.
We’re getting the results we want. And this all feels so easy and right.
