Are Your Marketing Systems Not Working? Stop Gambling & Start Winning
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Are your marketing systems working for you? Well, maybe you should stop gambling and start winning. Now, there is nothing absolute about any kind of marketing or advertising, or any kind of art in general. There’s no way to predict what’s going to happen, but there are ways to align concepts that are going to help you get a better return on investment.
We all want success. We tend to envision success being this straight line from zero to a hundred, right? It goes up at an angle. But in reality, success is kind of all over the place. It may go up a little, down a little, left, right, and then finally it ends up at the same beginning and ending point, but it’s not a straight line. To win at marketing, it takes a little bit of luck.
Scratch And Pray
When I was running my current and past businesses, I had many successes and a few failures. At one point, I hate to admit it, I was so broke I didn’t have any cash and was living off of credit cards.
Now at the time, many of the restaurants that I was eating at wouldn’t take credit cards; they wanted cash. So I was relinquished to basically going to a gas station and buying food there.
One day, as I was getting my chips and my Diet Coke, and I put it down on the counter, there sitting below it, underneath the glass was my answer. It was a lottery ticket. I know it’s a gamble, but somebody’s got to win, and you hope that you’re going to scratch off that million-dollar prize and all your problems will be solved.
Bells, Whistles, & Flashing Lights
That same feeling happens when you go into a casino. You really don’t notice a whole lot, except all the blinking lights and the sounds of those slot machines going off. The key thing about a slot machine is you win when you align certain pictures. When they align, depending on which ones, you win some money. Usually, three, five, or ten times the amount you put in. Sometimes you win the jackpot, which is everything. You hope you’re hitting that scratch-off, right?
I want to talk about pre-aligning those things so you have a better chance of success when you pull the lever on your marketing.
The Marketing Trifecta – Aligning Your Content
One of the things that I talk about in terms of a successful marketing system is the marketing trifecta. There are three components: your website, your analytics or your data, and your content.
Now, a website needs to have customer-focused information. It shouldn’t be all about you. It should teach people something, and not just spend the whole time bragging about your accomplishments, but it also needs to be super easy to find answers. That’s why people are there. They want to learn more about their problem and how you can help them solve it.
The analytics should tell you how people are engaging, not just how many hits you’re getting. How much time are they spending on your site? Which pages are they spending time on? Are they watching your videos? Are they reading your content? That’s what you really want to know.
And then finally, there is that content that you put on the web pages. It could be eBooks that could be downloaded or blogs that can be read. It could be videos or even webinars that are sitting up there. That content needs to be consumed, and you want to measure that.
All three of those pieces; your website, the analytics, and the content, work as a system to your success.
Aligning Your Teams
Now, for this success to happen, there are three other things. Three rows need to line up when you pull that lever.
The first one is your sales team. Are they maximizing the social media tools at their fingertips? If not, can you help them do it by teaching them or doing it for them?
Next, are they visible? Do people see them? Are they reading their content and engaging with it?
And then finally, are they engaging back with people who are engaging with them? It’s one thing to post content on a social media site, it’s another thing to answer questions that people have or engage with them, or answer messages.
The next piece of this is your CRM. Your CRM is used to track those relationships. Is your sales team using it to enter notes that you can kind of track what’s been happening? Not that big brother is watching, but just to create a follow-up map or an engagement map with those people.
And finally, you can use a CRM to schedule interactions. You can tell it to remind you three months from now, six months from now to contact somebody in case they may be interested in what you have to sell.
I’ve noticed that companies that have ownership, who have a vision of how to get their messages out, then spend time spotting trends about what people are engaging in, and then invest in creating great content that supports their sales team, tend to have a lot more success in general than those who just pull the lever on that slot machine.
Aligning Your Outcomes
Now on a slot machine, the goal is to line up pictures. And very common on slot machines, you’ll see cherries, bars, and then the jackpot symbols. Usually in that order.
The first part that you want to line up is your content. You want to make sure that your website, your blogs, and eBooks are used as content that you can distribute across the internet via social media, email, and other ways. That is the fuel to the engine that drives your sales team.
The next one is the bars. You can have one bar, triple bars depend on the slot machine, but that’s the engagement. You want to raise the bar on your engagement with your sales team. It’s one thing for somebody to like a social media post. It’s another thing for somebody to comment, but when your team is engaged in a way that they create messages back and forth, that’s how you build that know, like, and trust that turns into sales at the right time for your customer.
If you want that jackpot, you have to invest in relationships if you want to win that progressive big win. You want to engage people in conversations so that you can be one of the people or one of the options for the solution that they’re looking for to their problems. Ultimately, if you’re using your website and that trifecta and your sales team and supporting them with content on the web that creates conversations with your perfect current and past clients, you have the opportunity to hit the jackpot.
The big difference here is you have to understand the difference between investment and gambling. Advertising can be more like gambling, where creating content creates ROI.
Final Thoughts
Even though I never hit that million-dollar scratch-off, I was able to work through it. Although gambling can be fun, it’s certainly not a way to run a business. Investing in quality content, creating systems around distributing it, helping your sales teams have better communications, and developing better relationships is the kind of investment that is just as fun and even more profitable than taking a chance on a slot machine or scratch-off It all comes down to marketing systems.
Nowadays, I get my food delivered to me from Amazon, but they don’t have any scratch-off tickets when I check out, but that’s okay. I never really won much anyway.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this. Comment below and share your thoughts, ideas, or questions about marketing systems. Are you successfully utilizing marketing systems? What B2B marketing systems have worked and what did not live up to your expectations? Do you have any ideas or other advice you could share?
Brian Basilico is a nationally recognized author and speaker. He’s the founder and president of B2b Interactive Marketing Inc., an award winning marketing consulting and production company in Aurora Illinois. B2b helps companies and non-profits, market their products and services through the effective use of on-line tools including; websites, blogs,… View full profile ›
