99 Marketing Mistakes. Kenyon Blunt
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#8
Taking No Action
This mistake comes in two forms: 1) not following up on leads and 2) not responding based on results. Inaction, in both cases, leads to wasted marketing dollars. The core philosophy behind “Lean” is “Build-Measure-Learn.” This iterative process does no good if action is not taken based on the learnings. Let’s look at each one.
Not Following up on Leads
Failing to follow up is the most significant marketing sin of all time. It never ceases to amaze me that the majority of leads generated by marketing are not followed up by salespeople. It’s a tremendously expensive mistake, and it makes absolutely no sense! At a minimum, leads should be put into an automated system for follow-up (see mistake #58).
Why does this happen? Research suggests that only one in every 50 deals occurs right away, yet many sales efforts are ditched right at the beginning. People don’t initially buy for a host of reasons: inertia, lack of time, too many other things on their plate, concerns about cost, etc. Often, prospects want to confirm their decision before they make the purchase.
Here’s a good practice to ensure this doesn’t happen:
The Five “No’s” Follow-Up Strategy
Introduce a rule in your company where you maintain contact with every prospect until each one of them has said “no” or “not now” at least five times.
Not Taking Action Based on Results
With the marketing tools available today (e.g., Google Analytics, CRM systems, etc.), it’s easier to track results than ever. What small businesses are doing with this data is less clear. A mistake that I see is having useful data but not knowing what to do with it. Checking your numbers frequently gives you a good idea if your campaigns are working or not.
Here’s a tip. Do not look solely at the numbers alone – always try to find the root cause of the results. Challenge yourself to action. The answer might be to wait for more data, but at least you’ve gone through the process of reviewing the results.
Mistake #9
Ignoring The Competition
Many small business owners ignore their competition, and sometimes it’s for a good reason. There are three reasons why:
1 Why waste your resources on competitors? Tracking your rivals takes time, wouldn’t that time be better allocated on your own business?
2 Focus on your customers instead. The majority of an entrepreneur’s time should be spent on his or her customers and finding out what they need.
3 Don’t duplicate problems. If you spend too much time analyzing the competitors, you may end up having the same issues they do.
Why You Should Track Your Competitors
On the other hand, when you ignore your competitors, you do so at your peril. Here are some reasons to focus on your competitors a little more:
You may have to. What if you’re about ready to launch a new product offering, and your competitor beats you to the punch? By keeping an eye on your competitors, you can react before they do.
Learn from their mistakes. Look at what your competitors have done recently. Where did they go wrong? Did they miss out on a specific prospect? Whatever they’ve done poorly, try not to make the same mistake.
Watch out for your employees. Increasingly, your competitors come from within when ex-employees form companies. Understand if they could be a threat to your business.
How to Track Competitors
Here are some easy ways to track competitors:
Pick three. Find three other businesses like yours and study their marketing like you were back in school. Pay special attention to the tactics they only do once and those they repeat every month. Learn from their mistakes and successes.
Do a SWOT analysis. Look at the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for each significant competitor and see if you can uncover some marketing opportunities.
Use Google Alerts. A straightforward way of keeping track of your competitors is using Google Alerts. You can set up email alerts based on specific search terms allowing you to get essential updates on your competitors.
Mistake #10
No Metrics Or Benchmarks
You probably have a couple of metrics or benchmarks to gauge the health of your small company. Some business owners assume that it’s another one of those excess strategies which you can choose to accept or reject based on how your company’s doing. Many CEO’s have forgotten to focus on them.
There are three reasons why you need to have critical metrics:
1 They give insight into what’s working and what’s not
2 Metrics let you know how much you should be spending to acquire a customer
3 The more you study and use them, the better your ROI will become.
Why You Need Key Metrics
What are marketing metrics? They are a set of numbers that let you gauge the health of your marketing. Key metrics are also used to measure the other parts of your company (e.g., cash flow, profit, and loss, debt, etc.). However, I recommend a small set of numbers exclusively for marketing.
In my book, 5Unstuck, I refer to these numbers as vital signs. Think of them as your “patient chart.” You’re the doctor, and you want a few indicators that show the health of your marketing.
The concept of key performance indicators was created to help you wade through mountains of data and save you time.
Here’s an example of why you need them: Let’s say you’re spending $500 per month in pay-per-click advertising and another $500 on social media advertising. Which channel is the most effective at generating leads and customers? Should you shift monies from one channel to the other? You can answer these questions if you know your cost per lead (CPL) and cost per customer (CPC).
What Metrics Should You Track?
There’s a concept called a “balanced scorecard,” which means that your metrics should be balanced to cover all aspects of your company. I like to apply this concept to marketing. I’ve come up with four categories of metrics to assess the health of small business marketing:
Pipeline and sales metrics – These could be the cost per lead (CPL), cost per customer (CPC), number of leads in the pipeline, conversion rate, number of prospects added to the pipeline, etc.
Customer metrics – Examples are customer acquisition cost (CAC), customer retention rate (aka churn rate), lifetime value of a customer (LTV), net promoter score (NPS), etc.
Channel metrics – These will vary based on which channels you’re employing. For email marketing, your parameters could be click-through rates, open rates, conversion rates, list growth, etc. Each platform in social media has metrics that show which posts are performing the best.
Website metrics – Your website is the hub of your marketing. KPI’s for website traffic, traffic sources, bounce rate, conversion rate, etc. are good to know. It’s also reasonably easy to do with 6Google Analytics.
After you’ve picked your key metrics, analyze your findings every quarter. Look for trends that either exceed or lag your goals. Also, revisit your benchmarks periodically and recalibrate.
5 Kenyon Blunt, Unstuck, Tulsa, Yorkshire Publishing, 2015.
6 https://analytics.google.com
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