First of all, if you own a small or medium-sized business in the Tri-Cities or surrounding area, you have my appreciation.
Why?
Because owning a small business may be one of the most difficult occupations there is.
The hours are often VERY LONG. The kickback is not. Money can be uncertain, markets change, employees leave, customers behave unpredictably and expenses have an annoying habit of arriving whether revenue does or not.
And yet, here you are.
If your doors are open and your business is operating, you're already doing something right.
So naturally, I'm going to reward you by asking some potentially irritating questions.
At Crow & Compass Creative, I believe the path to useful answers isn't always pain-free. Sometimes the most valuable question a consultant can ask isn't “How should we market this?”
Sometimes it's:
“Should we be marketing this yet?”
Because there is an uncomfortable truth about advertising that doesn't get discussed nearly enough:
“Sometimes the reason your marketing isn't working has nothing to do with your marketing.”
You can have a great ad, excellent media placement and a perfectly targeted audience—and still waste money if the business waiting on the other side isn't ready to convert that attention into customers.
So before you spend another dollar trying to get more people through your door, onto your website or on the telephone, here are four questions worth answering honestly.
And I do mean honestly.
1. What happens when a customer actually arrives?
If customers visit your physical location, stop looking at it through the eyes of someone who walks into it every day.
Try to see it for the first time.
Is it clean? Does it look professional? Is the signage clear? Is the paint chipped? Are the windows dirty? Is the parking lot confusing? Is there clutter everywhere?
And here's one businesses sometimes forget:
How does it smell?
Seriously.
Customers begin forming opinions about your business long before anyone speaks to them.
I've watched businesses spend considerable money trying to create a polished image through advertising while seemingly ignoring the physical environment customers encounter when they actually respond to that advertising.
That's a problem.
Can a phenomenal business operate from an ugly building in a lousy location?
Absolutely.
Great businesses overcome disadvantages all the time.
But why voluntarily give yourself another disadvantage?
If someone walks through your door and immediately encounters dirt in the corners, chipped paint, confusing signage or an environment that simply doesn't feel cared for, you've created a contradiction between the business your advertising promised and the business the customer actually encountered.
Sometimes the best marketing investment you can make isn't another $2,000 in advertising.
Sometimes it's a gallon of paint and some elbow grease.
2. What happens when your marketing actually works?
This is one of my favorites.
Years ago, while working as a digital sales lead for a local television company, I received a message from a client who wanted to meet because they didn't believe their Google Pay-Per-Click campaign was working.
Fair enough.
Before meeting with them, I sat down with my digital analyst and reviewed the campaign.
And something didn't make sense.
The campaign was generating calls.
Quite a few of them, actually.
Now, not every call generated by advertising becomes a customer. That's never going to happen. But the volume was high enough that I was genuinely surprised the client wasn't seeing increased business.
So I decided to conduct a highly sophisticated technical investigation.
I Googled them and called the number.
Ring.
Ring.
Ring.
Ring.
Ring.
Ring.
Answering machine.
Okay. It happens.
I waited about half an hour and tried again.
Ring.
Ring.
Ring.
Ring.
Ring.
Ring.
Answering machine.
Interesting.
About an hour later, I tried one more time.
Ring.
Ring.
Ring.
Click.
An employee answered.
Not particularly enthusiastically.
“Yeah, this is XXXXX. Can I help you?”
I asked about one of the services being promoted in the company's advertising.
There was a pause.
“I haven't heard anything about that. I guess I can check with XXXXX when they get back. Want to call us again in about an hour?”
And there it was.
The advertising was working.
The business wasn't ready for the advertising to work.
That's an extreme example, but I've encountered less dramatic versions of it more times than I care to remember.
Calls go unanswered. Employees don't know about current promotions. Online inquiries sit untouched. Someone answering the phone sounds irritated that a customer had the audacity to call the business. Front-line employees don't understand what the company is currently advertising.
Meanwhile, management wonders why marketing isn't producing more customers.
“Advertising can make the telephone ring. It cannot make your employees answer it well.”
If you're paying to create opportunities and then losing those opportunities during the customer interaction, part of your marketing budget is essentially being burned after it successfully did its job.
Before increasing advertising, make sure your business can handle the response you're already generating.
3. Is what you're selling actually competitive?
Here comes another uncomfortable one.
Is your product or service actually as good as you think it is?
Business is tough. Always has been. Probably always will be.
And one of the fundamental ways businesses compete is by giving customers a clear reason to choose them instead of somebody else.
That advantage can come from price.
But it doesn't have to.
Maybe you're faster. Better. More convenient. More experienced. Easier to work with. More specialized. You provide exceptional service. You offer something competitors don't. Your finished product is noticeably superior.
Whatever it is, there needs to be a reason.
If your price is substantially higher than your competitors, is there something about the experience or end product that justifies the difference?
If your product is essentially identical, why should someone choose yours?
If the answer is simply, “Because we're really good people,” I have some unfortunate news about the number of really good people currently trying to make payroll.
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.
The more difficult your offering is to understand, justify or differentiate, the more money and effort you'll have to put behind convincing people to buy it.
Ideally, you want your business positioned so that someone encountering it can understand its value without requiring a spreadsheet, a PowerPoint presentation and a 45-minute explanation.
That isn't possible for every business or every product.
But the closer you can get, the easier everything downstream becomes.
4. Is your “great offer” actually a great offer?
This overlaps with the previous question, but it deserves its own section because I've seen this disconnect for more than 20 years.
Businesses understandably want marketing that produces dramatic results.
The phone should ring.
Appointments should fill.
Customers should arrive.
Sales should spike.
Fantastic.
What are you giving the customer in return for that urgency?
One of the best pieces of advice I ever heard about using an offer to rapidly drive business was essentially this:
If you need an immediate and dramatic response, the offer should make your stomach twist a little.
I've remembered that for years.
The point isn't that every business should slash prices or give away its products.
Quite the opposite.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with maintaining your margins, protecting your brand and promoting a modest offer.
But your expectations need to match the offer.
A 5% discount on something people weren't particularly motivated to purchase yesterday probably isn't going to cause them to abandon dinner, leap into the family vehicle and race across town before you close.
And no amount of clever graphic design is going to change that.
The stronger the offer, the easier it generally becomes to generate immediate attention.
The weaker the offer, the more realistic you need to be about how quickly the market will respond.
“You don't get to offer modest urgency and expect extraordinary urgency in return.”
Sometimes the Best Marketing Advice Is “Not Yet.”
These four questions aren't designed to talk anyone out of marketing.
They're designed to make marketing work better.
Before investing heavily in outreach, ask yourself:
What happens when customers arrive?
What happens when they call?
Is what we're selling genuinely competitive?
And does our offer justify the response we're expecting?
If the answers make you uncomfortable, that's useful information.
Fixing those problems may produce a better return than immediately increasing your advertising budget.
Marketing is often a long game. It works best when it's connected to a solid business strategy, a competitive product, realistic expectations and an organization capable of taking advantage of the opportunities marketing creates.
Throwing money at advertising before those pieces are ready can absolutely create activity.
But activity isn't necessarily business.
And impressions aren't revenue.
“Before spending more money getting people to your business, make sure you're happy with what they'll find when they get there.”
That's not an argument against marketing.
That's how you make marketing worth paying for.