Executing on the Marketing Basics

by Joey Flores on August 1, 2009

Not too long ago, I responded to an ad looking for a marketing consultant to help guide a company to the next level. The ad was cleverly written and asked for a Marketing Rockstar who gets fired up about achieving big results and is up on all the newest trends. It had a questionnaire that the client wanted each person to fill out that asked questions about groundbreaking ad campaigns you admired, new approaches to marketing old products, and which industry leaders’ blogs you read to keep up on the latest trends.

At any rate, I wrote a letter to the prospect answering their questions and filling them in on my background. I was clear that I don’t read much in the way of industry newsletters and probably couldn’t name more than one expert in the field. I’ll tell you why in a minute.

We met a few times and, shortly thereafter they hired me for a two month project. The following Monday I started and began a review of their current situation. I analyzed their tracking and reporting capabilities, their web assets, their team and any immediate opportunities we might capitalize on.

Long story short, I found what I find at most small companies. There was no need for groundbreaking campaigns or ingenius viral marketing tactics. We did not need to know the newest trends because many of the most basic needs of successful marketing had to be addressed first. A foundation for smart decision making needed to be laid, and a mastery of traditional online channels was certainly a bigger priority than blowing out the doors with something that would land the company on the pages of AdWeek (see, I do know a few pubs).

To me, if you aren’t doing the following, don’t bother trying to be cute:

1. Understanding Your Metrics: First and foremost, there is no need to try anything fancy if you won’t know whether it worked or not. You need to know, what are your Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) and why? Are you aiming for revenue, gross margin, net profits, or all three? Perhaps you’re looking to prove market demand, so just getting a lot of customers is your most important objective. Whatever it is, know it, be setup to track it, and create a plan around improving that or those metrics consistently. If you don’t know what you’re shooting for, you can’t aim, so don’t shoot.

2. Do One Thing Well Before Moving Onto the Next: Why expand into new marketing channels if you’re wasting money in the ones you’re already in? While making sure you balance effort with ROI for your time spent optimizing, make sure that you’re performing well in your current channels before you start branching out. There is no point in comparing a bad campaign in display to a bad campaign in search to see which channel is better. Focus on your most strategic channel first, optimize the hell out of it, keep it running smoothly, then move on to the next most important channel.

3. Optimize at the Top of the Funnel: Every small company has limited resources. That means that assessing opportunity cost should be top of mind with every decision you make. That said, there is always greater impact to conversion if you optimize the highest number of customers first. Start with your landing page until you’re comfortable with the results, then the next page in the funnel and so on. Obviously there are exceptions to this rule, like if your credit card page is crashing constantly, but for the most part you want to improve conversion on the highest number of people possible – which is always at the top of your funnel.

4. Don’t Make Changes Until You’ve Tried What You Have: I’ve seen companies build a site and reskin it before they’ve even used it. Not only is this completely demoralizing to the people who built the site, but it’s a huge waste of information. You might as well test this thing, get some value out of it, and compare it to the next. How do you really know it isn’t going to work? You thought it would when you designed it, right? Unless you’ve gathered metrics to support a change, stick with what you’ve got until you do.

At any rate, there are plenty of other basic blocking and tackling techniques that I can list here but the point is, unless you’re doing these things, launching a massive campaign or investing time and resources in some complicated marketing strategy is just bad business. Similarly, unless your sales team is closing the leads they’ve got, there is very little point in investing a lot of resources in getting them more leads. Make sure you’re doing all of your current initiatives well before spending valuable time, money or people on expansion. Your team and your business will thank you for it.

Joey Flores
EVP of Marketing
StartupArmy.com – Bring in the heavy artillery

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