People see an advertisement. Some remember it. Some engage with it. Some visit your website. Some call. Some fill out a form. Some walk through the door. Some eventually buy. Depending on the campaign, we might look at impressions, reach, frequency, click-through rates, cost per click, calls, conversions, leads, appointments, cost per acquisition, return on ad spend and plenty of other measurements.

Those numbers can be extraordinarily valuable.

But they're clues. They're not automatically the objective.

“Don't confuse evidence that your marketing is doing something with evidence that it's doing something valuable.”

And that's where business owners occasionally get buried in numbers.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with liking the people you do business with.

In fact, I strongly recommend it.

Life is considerably too short to spend hours sitting across conference tables from people you can't stand.

Have lunch.

Talk about the kids.

Tell stories.

Laugh.

Build real relationships.

Just don't confuse the quality of the relationship with the quality of the advice.

At some point, every professional relationship should survive one very simple question:

Is this making my business better?

The first step in marketing something successfully is making sure you have something marketable.

“But everything is marketable, isn't it?”

Theoretically.

Then again:

“Everything can fly if you throw it hard enough.”

The heavier the object, the more arm you're going to need.

Marketing works the same way.

Wait.

If there are still only four chiropractors, how did the number of competitors increase?

Because customers don't budget in industry categories.

They budget in dollars.

Let's imagine a family trying to make some decisions about Dad this year.

Dad needs new glasses and an eye exam.

Dad probably ought to have his hearing checked because his daily allotment of “WHAT?” is beginning to annoy his wife and children.

His knee has been bothering him, and it's probably time to have an orthopedic specialist look at it.

And regular chiropractic visits help keep his back from hurting.

In a household with plenty of disposable income, those things don't necessarily compete with one another.

Schedule the appointments. Get the glasses. Check the ears. Look at the knee. Keep going to the chiropractor.

Done.

But what happens when that family's available money gets tighter?

A Tale of Two Conferences

At the time, I was working for a local television station. Like many traditional media companies in the modern era, sales weren't growing at the rate the guys upstairs would have preferred.

This is, of course, the natural order of things.

Media audiences have fragmented dramatically. Consumers have more choices than ever. Digital advertising disrupted traditional media and then promptly began disrupting itself. Meanwhile, corporate revenue expectations have an amusing tendency to remain considerably less complicated than the markets expected to produce them.