Of course if you are an advocate for weeds, you might find my actions rather heinous. There might be a study out there that shows that weeds actually feel pain when they are pulled. It may show that they actually weep when they are poisoned with herbicides. In fact, there could be large groups of people who are activists for allowing weeds to have equal status with grass in lawns. They could be picketing in my neighborhood very soon, carrying posters of shriveled dandelions, chickweed turning brown, and dried out Canadian thistle, chanting, "Give weeds a chance." You get the picture.

As absurd as all of that sounds, this is the sort of thing that happens in marketing quite often. It is based on the thought that all methods that can be used to market your products or services are created equally. They are not. Some methods are outdated for today's electronic age. Some never worked in the first place. In other words, there are marketing weeds. How do you determine what works and what does not? The answer is rather simple: sales. When marketing methods are doing their job, they will lead to sales. Too often businesses throw good money away because they do not require their marketing methods to result in sales.

Hold on a minute! Where does awareness marketing figure into all of this? If I am building brand awareness, doesn't that count for something? It certainly does, but awareness marketing is designed to lead to the next step, which is first time sales. For instance, if you are hosting an event - let's say it is a golf outing - and you have advertised your brand so everyone is aware of your involvement in the event, yet neither anyone who is at the event nor any of their contacts make any kind of purchase from you, was it worth it? If you're being honest, no it was not. You may have golfing fanatics in your office who will argue that hosting the golf outing was good for employee morale, good for camaraderie amongst the departments, good for management to be seen as givers and not just task masters, etc. This may all be true, but this argument is a function of human resources, not marketing. So let HR fund it and call it a company golf outing. But don't throw marketing dollars at it, invite people who will not do business with you and call it brand awareness. At the end of each marketing effort you make, you need to belly up to the table and ask what that effort did to lead you to sales. If it did not contribute, in some fashion, to a sale, it is a marketing weed. Get rid of it. At the same time, you will find that there are marketing methods that do work. They help make prospects out of strangers, customers out of prospects, and return customers out of first time customers. Put your marketing money where you are getting results.

Two words of caution should be applied here. First, understand that marketing takes time to be effective. (See my article Shortening the Sales Cycle.) Just because it takes time doesn't mean you should not measure your success. For instance, once a potential customer has been touched by your marketing, are your sales staff following up with them? You will get a real sense of how effective your marketing is when you get a true sense of whether or not it has moved the prospective client closer to the sale. There may be reasons they have not bought from you yet, such as budget cycles that will not permit the purchase now. Too many times, I see businesses make a guess at why marketing did not work immediately, and most of the time they are wrong. You will never know for sure until you have a conversation. Good communications with your prospects is key here.