Sometimes You Get More than You Bargained For

I recently worked with a plumbing company – a very straight forward husband & wife team. (Marketing to many plumbers is an ad in the Yellow Pages and a name on the side of their van, so they had approached me with some trepidation). We worked on a localised mail campaign which addressed the real concerns of people looking for plumbers and I advised them to spend a little time and boot leather delivering the letters around their local area.

Yesterday was wet. Very wet. Yet undeterred, and armed with a couple of hundred envelopes, Mrs Smith (not a changed name, she really is Mrs Smith!) posted letters on four roads in the pouring rain before deciding that enough was enough and going home. When she got back she was astonished. She had four calls from customers waiting for her and through her letterbox she found a handwritten note which read:


'Many thanks for your circular. As a retired commercial director I must congratulate you on your efficient presentation of this excellent letter. I have put your sticker on the inside of my kitchen units and will most definitely be using you when the need arises.'


What do we learn here? That;

1, Getting marketing done professionally pays
2, The fundamental principles of profitable marketing are universal and recognisable
3, Adding something that engages the ‘might use you in the future’ group is a sure-fire winner
4, Don’t put things off because it’s raining (use that as a metaphor for recession if you will too)
5, Hand written notes have the power to touch people even more than four new customers

They Don't Believe You

When people don’t believe they don’t act. You don’t get many Sikhs going to church on a Sunday morning, and you won’t find many environmentalists queuing up to buy a 4x4. Strangely though a Sikh may be welcomed into a church very warmly and many 4x4s are actually quite green with good mpg/CO2 figures, clean engines, and long life cycles. But it won’t happen if people don’t believe.

When people do believe they’ll act in utterly incredible and even unjustifiable ways. They’ll camp outside your shop of a cold night waiting for it to open, they’ll fly to the States to buy the latest Apple i-whatever so they can have it three months early, they’ll rave about you. In extreme they’ll do frightening things that are totally justifiable only in their own minds – like deliberately blowing themselves up and killing innocent women and children in the process. Belief is sometimes frighteningly powerful.

People make their decisions around what they believe and what they don’t. What they believe about you, your claims and your industry. The time share business suffers here. Time share holiday homes – what a great idea – but we all believe we’re going to get ripped off so we avoid them. If their claims get bolder – however true they might actually be – we only believe them less.

If people aren’t buying from you in the numbers you’d like it’s probably because at some level they don’t believe you. It’s not that they’re wrong, it’s just you haven’t convinced them otherwise yet. It’s (probably) not that they think you’re lying either. You just haven’t got them to really ‘get it’ yet.

When they do believe, they’ll buy. And they’ll rave about you. That’s what people do.

So if your product really is that good, it really is twice as powerful as your competitors’, how are you going to communicate that credibly? Because unless they’re believing it, you’re wasting your time and probably your marketing spend with it. It’s more than likely something really simple that’s blocking your path. Be honest with yourself and identify it.


Happy selling.

The Big Marketing Budget Mistake

Imagine your bank did this deal for you. For every £1 you give them, they give you £1.10. They then give you thirty days to pay your bit, too.

Now here’s the question. How much are you going to budget to spend with them?

Of course you’d be mad not to spend as much as you possibly could with them and to continually reinvest what you take out. Why would you put a budget on it?!

This is the madness of marketing budgets. If your marketing works – ie: it’s giving you a measured positive result – why would you do anything other than spend as much as possible on it? High growth companies of all sizes tend to get this and they become obsessed with working out customer lifetime values, how much they are happy to spend to acquire each new customer and then continually spending in the areas where they can be sure to get a positive return that they can measure.

Much of my work centres on getting business owners and directors to stop dreaming up and wasting budgets, and to start learning to find and actively maximise these calculated money makers. (When you consider I guarantee my fee for this work you realise how sure I am of the difference there is for you here). Good marketing is like your bank giving you £1.10 for every £1, not about sticking to budgets.