Business professionals call me four or five times a month to find out, on the phone,  how they can increase their revenues 10%, 25%, even 100% (!) in a year or less.  

I used to ask, "Well, what's a free marketing plan worth to you?" Sometimes I'd even compose a lengthy email full of proactive suggestions based on sketchy input.

Then I thought it might be easier to answer all those FAQs all at once.  So if you've found this page through a search engine or an email from me, here goes.

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     Perhaps some of these questions have crossed your mind, recently:

     Should you try to gain share of market using brute force or finesse? 

     Should you hire more salesmen or take a flier at some sort of advertising, SEOPS, direct mail or other type of "marketing"?

     What is marketing, anyway?  
     How do you do it?  
     How much will it cost?  
     When will it pay off?  
     Where do you start?

     Do you really need marketing at all?

     Sound familiar?

     If your revenues come mostly from direct sales, referrals, and repeat business, you may think of marketing as an easily postponed expense – like buying a rosewood conference table or putting up a really big sign out front – something you might do when you’ve saved up enough money. 

     In the meantime, your Corporate Engine is humming along reasonably well.  Operations delivers a good competitively priced product. Sales has learned to work lists of current customers, referrals, and category prospects. Your on-line brochure delivers the facts to active shoppers. Management can predict the revenues, costs, and profits from each incremental sale or salesman.

     Most “marketing” actions – such as public relations, print ads, direct mail, radio & TV, convention displays, contests, co-promotions, collateral packages, customer research, PPC, SEM & SEOPS – aren't nearly as predictable. 

     They require an upfront investment in time and money.  They may involve skills and techniques outside your range of experience or expertise.  They usually take time to pay out. 

     What’s worse, once you start marketing and it works, it’s very, very hard to stop.

     It’s probably safer to hire another salesman. Or four. 

     Sound familiar?

MORE POWER TO YOU!

     Rather than pigeonhole marketing as an optional expense, it’s more useful to think of it as high octane fuel, i.e. something that makes all the parts of your Corporate Engine work faster, more smoothly, and more effectively. 



     1) Marketing can enhance your brand’s prestige among current customers and their peers, colleagues and other third-party influencers. It can induce positive comments on your customers’ good judgment, speed word of mouth referrals, defuse objections, and blunt competitive attacks. 

     2) Marketing can build awareness, consideration, and trial among Total Strangers who might otherwise never, ever, ever take a cold call. 

     3) Marketing can help Operations plan future products and services based on the needs of a broader sample of prospects than your own covey of loyal patrons. 

     4) Marketing can even help management predict a steady supply of sales and profits from future customers who may not even know you exist. Today.

 
But isn’t marketing a complicated subject full of arcane buzzwords and statistical rules?

     It can be, but mostly marketing is a one-on-many version of one-on-one salesmanship. Instead of pitching one prospect for an hour, you hit 60,000 of ‘em all at once.   Here's a free marketing plan that takes three weeks to run and might work for any company, especially a small B2B firm. (The same principles work for consumer goods & services, too.)

THE THREE WEEK BLITZ

      You write a pithy 500-word article for a trade magazine read by many of your prospects. The article runs in the same issue as a catchy ad that delivers the same message, perhaps more cleverly. One fine Monday morning, the article and the ad land on the desks of dozens of current customers and thousands of potential prospects who have never heard of you. Some people read both.

     A few days later, an eye-grabbing direct mail piece arrives on a few hundred desks.  It invites recipients to visit your booth at an upcoming trade show. An above average number of Admin Assts decide to NOT trash it.

     The following week, those folks who do look you up see an on-line or live demo of your brand, enter a drawing for a well-known “thing”, pick up some slick (i.e. well-written and produced) collateral, maybe fill out a survey, and swap business cards with your sales reps. 

     Since your article contains the three or four most-often-searched keyword phrases in your business, the on-line version attracts thousands of future Googlers. Some will browse
your site, take the Perl-coded version of your 
survey, request more information, and even pick up the phone.

     From publication to trade show to SEOPS html, that free marketing plan took just a few weeks to run. It may have taken several months to prepare. It may take several more months to write additional sales from existing and new customers you influence. 

    

     If you only run the program once, you might see a blip in quarterly income. If you’re lucky you’ll break even on the costs of the program. 

      If, however, you run something like it every month for half a year, you'll soon begin to see steady results you could not possibly attain using the same safe, predictable, tried and true direct sales methods you use today.

     Yes, but how much will all this cost?  How soon will it pay out?  Do you need a formal budget and timetable?  What will that cost?   Can’t you just wing it - try a few things and see if they work?

LET YOUR SALES FORCE DECIDE 
IF YOU NEED MARKETING SUPPORT!     

     Here’s a little low-cost in-house research you can run that will help clarify the issue in about 8 hours.

     Give your top salesmen an A-list of 100 good prospects whom you have never contacted before. 

     Ask them to call all 100 during one business day. Use your standard greeting and sales pitch. 

     Keep Score.

     Score 1 point for every sale you make, or for every prospect who does something positive, like ask for more information.

     Score 0 points for DOA’s. Dead On Arrivals are people who are not available, don’t call back, are "no longer with the firm," or who have no reasonable need for your product (not all lists are perfect!).

     You lose 1 point for every viable prospect or gatekeeper you reach who says, “No.” because they:

•  Have never heard of your company or brand.
•  Are happy with their current suppliers.
•  Don’t have time to talk to you. 
•  Have no budget.
•  Are in a meeting.
•  Aren’t interested.
•  Etc.
•  Etc.
  

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All these excuses, objections, blocks and brush-offs have one thing in common besides the telltale, slightly impatient tone of voice. The respondents are UNAWARE of you, your company or your brand.

People only buy things they are aware of. 
These folks are not aware of you. 

"Sorry, not today!"

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     If, at the end of the exercise, your team posts a net negative score, you might need a marketing program. 

	BUYERS	DOA	UNAWARES
	+1	0	-1
100 Calls	5	70	25
- 20	+5	0	-25

     In this Score Card 25 people were not willing to learn about or do business with your Unknown Company. Only 5 were willing to try your Unknown Brand on its merits, even with excellent salesmanship. 

     Apply your Net Score to your entire market, category or prospect base. You can get through to [30%] of your prospects but only [1 in 6] will buy from you.

     Sound familiar?

     If you want to double sales you can double your sales efforts – i.e. make 200 to 20,000 more calls – or you can try to increase the number of people who are AWARE of you when they answer the phone.

     But, you ask, isn’t awareness awfully expensive?   Yes it is. Universal awareness is hideously expensive. Coke, McDonald’s and General Motors spend billions. You, however, needn’t become a household word to dramatically increase revenues. In fact, the more negative your score the easier it will be to build profitable awareness. 

	BUYERS	DOA	UNAWARES
	+1	0	-1
100 Calls	5	35	60
- 55	+5	0	-60

 

     In this Score Card. your prospects are fairly easy to reach – you talked to 65 of them! But only 5 said, “Yes!” Sixty said, “Go away!” You might double your  sales next year if only 10% to 15% of today’s UNAWARES know who you are when your salesmen call.

 

"Yeah, yeah, yeah... I've heard of you.  
Whatcha got?"

     
     So how much money should you spend on this thing called marketing?  There are no hard and fast formulas that apply to all business categories, but here’s a general rule of thumb: 

If you spend half your incremental Sales Budget on good marketing you can often achieve your incremental Revenue goals in about half the time. 

     
     Say you’re grossing $4 million a year today and want to get to $5 million by this time next year. 

If today’s Sales Budget is $800,000 or 20% of gross, you’d likely spend 20% of the extra $1 million, or $200,000, on incremental Sales commissions, salaries, expenses and overhead. If you spend $100,000 on marketing, your salesmen may well get you to $5 million in six to eight months.  (Don't touch their commissions.  Just don't hire any new salesmen for the time being.)  

     How will you divvy that $100K up between Internet, collateral, direct mail, research, promotions, conventions, advertising and the like? How much will you have to spend up front before you see results?  How much should you spend month 1,2,3…?  Where does all this go on your business plan?

     Once again, there are no hard and fast formulas.

If your prospects are hard to reach in person, you might try SEM, SEOPS, Direct Mail, and Direct Response ads. 

If your salesmen get through easily but then get brushed off you might favor image ads, convention shows, and tie-in promotions with better-known brands.

If your target audience is consumers or a fairly large cross section of business people you might try Radio or TV. 

If you decide to run media, spend at least 10% of your media budget on production value. It’s better to look and sound big and important to 9 people than to look small and cheap to 10.  

     It will take some head-scratching and experimenting to figure out your best marketing mix. You will waste some money. You will try lots of things. Many will fail. A few will succeed. Do more. Learn as you go. Seek professional advice. (Me, for example.)  Expect to pay something for your next free marketing plan.

    Probably the best advice I can give you is DO NOT think of marketing as an occasional activity you participate in when the mood strikes, or when you have a few extra bucks in the petty cash drawer.

     COMMIT to a future revenue goal. COMMIT some number of dollars to a marketing war chest up front. Consider those dollars UNTOUCHABLE, SPENT, VANISHED, OUT THE DOOR, GONE FOREVER.

     Then use your noodle to figure out how to get them back. 

 

SEE ALSO:

Zero Based Budgeting.  If you have a general idea of how many customers you'd like to attract, this Start-from-Square-One approach will help clarify how much it will cost.

V-Marketing.  Every marketing program can be visualized as one dynamic letter.

Free Ideas. Your last ad campaign bombed. Now what?

Logical Analysis Leading To A Leap Of Faith. Seven easy questions to answer before you do anything else.

The Basics of Direct Response Radio. A seven-part introduction to strategy, creative, media, and mathematics.

Problem Detection Research.  This simple low-cost discovery technique can identify your competitors' main weaknesses.  Exploit them! 

The Future of Search Engine Marketing. Hundreds of millions of searches. Hundreds of millions of keywords. Where’s your brand? Aha!
The Steam Principle. Humans are 77% water and behave like it, especially when we get all hot and bothered about some new THING. Do you sell things?

Case Histories. Nine short stories. All the usual characters, corporate sturm und drang, the not so obvious solutions leading to happy endings.

The Fast Sell.  A soup to nuts free marketing plan for a luxury high rise condominium in an unusual location.  Includes strategy, creative, media, and a payout plan.

Print & TV 

The Radio Show