Have you ever made the wrong assumptions and ended up in a bad place? I have.
Several years ago, I was on a business trip and landed in Newark, New Jersey the evening before my meeting. I had booked a hotel room for the night and rented a car to get there. It was very late at night and there was not much traffic on the highway. I passed my hotel and got off at the next exit and found an unmarked access road that looked like it would lead to my destination. (This was years before there were GPS systems to help you find a place like this.) I saw a sign that said “Wrong Way.” However, no other cars were on this road and I knew my hotel was just a short distance ahead of my current location. I passed another sign that read, “Turn Around, You Are Under Surveillance.” Again, I wasn’t doing anything wrong, so I thought I would continue to my destination. However, the third sign I came to caused me to stop. It said, “New Jersey State Penitentiary. Do not leave your car. Armed Guards are watching you!” Somehow, I had turned onto a one-way road for the prison; I was going the wrong way, and it was the middle of the night. My assumptions had led me to a very bad place! I turned around and left as fast as I could. I found that the hotel’s street was at the next exit.
Have you ever made a wrong assumption about your marketing? I find that there are two extreme views that can both be wrong and damaging to your business. I will cover the first extreme this week and the other next week.
The first assumption is that what you have always done in marketing is working. Without measuring your success, you might be right or you might be wrong.
How do you measure marketing success? The easiest thing to do is to compare your sales to your marketing. In other words, you follow your sales back to their source. That requires you to interact with your customers and ask how they heard about you. It also requires you to set goals for your marketing and to do so based on your experience.
Let’s create a scenario. If you have a campaign that draws 1,000 sets of eyes to your website, how many of those people actually buy from you? Let’s break that down a bit. For every 1,000 people who come to your website, track how many look beyond your home page to explore your products or services. How long do they engage with your website? There should be a diminishing number that eventually buys from you. For example, I might find that for every 1,000 people on my website, 20 percent engage for over one minute on my products page and 5 percent of those actually buy from me. That equates to 10 new customers for every 1,000 people that browse my website. So, if my goal is to get 100 new customers, I will need 2,000 to engage for over one minute with my product page and 10,000 to browse to my website. That will help you set goals for your campaigns, but you cannot do this unless you have the analytics to back this up.
If you market based on what you have done before without any kind of measurement of your success, you will find yourself wasting time, money and effort on marketing that does not work. Often, that becomes a lot of junk with your logo on it that is not leading anyone closer to a sale. It also reflects a lax and lazy approach to marketing. When you are doing marketing the right way, you are anticipating changes within your target market.
If you want to avoid making wrong assumptions in your marketing, do the hard work of finding out the source of your sales and setting goals based on your experience with your target market.
Next week, we will look at the other extreme in wrong assumptions – the quick trigger finger that kills marketing before it gets a chance to work.