Are you wasting your marketing budget?
One year I spent $40,000 on marketing one of my seminars. I had radio advertising, hundreds of spots at specifically advantageous listening times, local and broadsheet newspaper advertisements, TV spots, the works. If it was available, I had some of my marketing in or on it.
Fortunately I maintained my other promotional efforts, and critically, I tracked all my marketing efforts and results.
What was the outcome from this expensive marketing budget?
Is this your marketing budget?
I had three, only three, sales from the $40,000 investment, and 47 from other methods of marketing. Net result; I was $30,000 worse off by spending all that money in my marketing budget.
What went wrong?
I was the perfect, ideal target client for an advertising executive. I was an uneducated small business person with a lot of money to spend. They perfectly assisted me in my endeavour to spend a lot of money on marketing.
Me and my old Marketing Budget
What could I have done better with my marketing budget?
Fortunately I had maintained my regular marketing efforts, but what would have made my marketing budget investment more effective was learning to target the perfect, ideal client for the product or service I was offering at that time.
You and I have this thing in common – we are both the absolute best person to know the problem that our product or service solves for our clients, and we are the best placed person to educate them on it!
The only reason we would pay another person who didn’t know our product or service as well as us, was that we hadn’t yet learnt how to present the education of our solution to the people who need it.
Effective marketing budget outcomes result in people with the problems we solve, self-selecting when they experience our marketing and recognising the solution they have been searching for.
Exactly what I was looking for!
Regardless of the product or service we provide, it means nothing unless the people out there in the community realise that it provides a solution to their problem. Our marketing budget must be used to educate them that we have that solution. The solution may look nothing like the problem they think they have, but our education will make the difference.
Marketing a specific product?
There is an ideal client for every product or service; this is a fact that many marketing experts don’t accept. We are told, especially in a multitude of online marketing trainings, that we must first ascertain what the market wants, and then tailor our problem to suit. That is a brilliant theory, but only if your situation permits.
What if you are an agent or dealer for a product from an external provider, that can’t really be tailored?
What if you have a unique talent or skill that thrills you to perform, and it is what it is?
How do you market something which doesn’t really offer you the flexibility of adapting it to a broad market sector?
The answer is to really understand what problem it solves, and for whom. Then get to know those people so well that you can go right up to them and introduce them to your solution.
Now that is a really effective use of your marketing budget!
Target your Ideal Client
Rather than spending a fortune on broadcasting a message of dubious value, perhaps a better investment of your marketing budget could be in self education on the two fundamental questions that really are the key to an effective marketing budget:
- What problem do you solve with your product or service?
- Who needs and is willing to pay for the problem to be solved?
Once you have clarity on exactly what problem your product or service solves, you can proceed to develop a profile on who has the need for that exact solution. The more clearly you identify that person or business, the more easily you can present your solution to them in the way they understand. You can educate them into asking you for your product or service. They self-select you as their solution and seek you out for it.
Isn’t that a better investment of a marketing budget?
If you don’t have that level of clarity yet, it’s time to work on it. Until then, your marketing budget is pretty well wasted.
How do you get this clarity around the solutions you provide?
Perhaps I can assist with my solution to that small business problem.
Perhaps it’s time to take a step back from your current marketing budget and re-evaluate it. Educate yourself about what it is that you really solve for your clients, and learn how to get your solutions to more of them, faster. This program, either in the self-paced form, or a facilitated workshop, may be the solution you need for this vexing problem of how to get the most value from your marketing budget.
Take a look now – I’d love to know your thoughts!
Til next time, take time to enjoy the life you live.
Ray Jamieson