9 Principles of Marketing: Principle 1 - Results Rule. Period.

As part of US Professional Military Training - we learn about 9 Principles of War that help to shape our thinking to improve the chances of us being victorious in the arena of battle. Curiously, there are 9 Principles of Marketing that can improve the chances of us being victorious in the arena of business. This is the first principle.

The First Principle of Marketing: Results Rule - Period.

On the face of it, this kind of makes sense. If something gets results, it is effective. If it doesn’t get results, it isn’t effective. Unfortunately – this is one of those places where a BFO – Blinding Flash of the Obvious – tends to occur. On one side of the BFO, it’s not so obvious. After you’ve heard it, there’s this flash of insight, and forever afterward it’s, “well, obviously that’s the right answer.” Right now, when I say “results” there may be a number of things that come to mind. I believe that after we talk about it, however, from now on when you hear “marketing results” only one thing – the obvious thing – will come to mind.

When you look on Google for “how to measure marketing effectiveness” you get all sorts of suggestions: Unique visitors, Page views, Search Engine Traffic, Bounce Rate, Inbound links, Comments, Social chatter, referral links, likes, shares, tweets, reach, frequency, gross rating points, views, and 122 million others (according to my search)

But think about it for just a minute. Your business is your primary source of income. You can’t pay your car payment with page views or buy groceries with likes or cover your house payment with gross rating points. In the end, for owner/operated businesses like yours – if it doesn’t make a profit, it isn’t worth anything.

Likes, views, clicks, impressions, or any other measure is a far second to “how much profit did it make…” From now on, when you think of marketing remember this first commandment – and remember “Results” is spelled with two dollar signs…

If you can’t tie your marketing directly to the profits that marketing leads to – you need better information – or you need better marketing – maybe both.

I know – marketing is an expense on the balance sheet – but you can’t afford to think of it as a cost – it has to be treated as an investment and you need to be able to identify the return you are getting on that investment, and it needs to be returning more than a dollar for every dollar you put in.

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