Fast, Good, Cheap
You can only have two, but do you only want two??
It’s nearly Christmas, and in the spirit of giving, I want to give you some free advice on why you should spend more on your marketing.
As someone who has worked in Business Development for the best part of 13 years, I always used to tell potential customers (usually when they were telling me my company’s services were too expensive) that they could have two out of these three elements when it came to the work they wanted completing. They could have it done fast and good, but it would cost them a lot. They could have it done fast and cheap, but it would probably be poor quality, or they could have it good and cheap, but it would take a long time. It was a tool I used to help guide people towards the understanding that we can’t deliver a complete rebrand in two weeks or, no, we can’t do it for half the price. However, I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.?
It works, in practice, to focus the mind on what you want. Who in their right mind will ever say, “I’m happy with cheap, fast and rubbish?” But, and it’s a big but… many people did, and still do. I’d often turn the work down at this point because if a client didn’t care enough to do good work, then the chances of success were so diminished that it would inevitably lead to us doing shoddy work we weren’t comfortable producing ourselves. As a business owner, I’ve recently told clients; you can have fast, cheap, and good. However, because we’re just over a year old, I’m happy to do some meaningful work for less than we usually would to get both the experience and the exposure. Still, it costs my business money because I refuse to do work badly (or ‘not good’ to stick with the trend). However, that’s an entirely different proposition to what I want to discuss, and that’s the concept of wanting to skimp on marketing as a business owner.?
Why??
Marketing has become cheaper and cheaper to produce. So many tools are available now that you almost don’t need to outsource marketing. Create a cookie-cutter website. Grab all your social profiles (connect them all up and implement tracking if you can). Set up HubSpot or Sendinblue (other CRMs are available). Buy a Canva licence (I’m not sure another excellent design tool exists outside of Adobe , but that’s a specialist skill). Now you’re a marketer! Sure, most business owners will not have the time to do this. But the point is this: You’re never, ever, ever going to grow a company without some marketing (if you can point to one example of a company that has, congratulations, you’ve found the exemption that proves the rule). You can have the best product in the world, but it’s pointless if no one knows about it. So, you have to have marketing. But this often now tends to mean that you have to put ‘stuff’ out into the world; quickly.?
So, let’s break each point down in a marketing context.?
Fast
Fast can be good; by that, I mean responsive (hello, Oreo Super Bowl blackout). But if all of your marketing is ‘fast’, I.e. you decide you need something tomorrow, you’ve messed up. You wouldn’t ask your auditor to do your annual accounts the day before they’re due, but you expect your marketing agency to be creative at a day’s notice? That is not going to happen. You’ll get something generic, boring, and safe. You need a plan, preferably a 6-12 month one. You are much more likely to know what products or features you want to launch next year. This is probably well-documented; use it! Take that plan, strip it down to headlines and then plan your marketing around it. Each element becomes a ‘campaign’.
Each has a fixed period to run, several vital assets that need creating ahead of time, and core actions that need to happen during the campaign. But they’re planned, mapped out and ready to go before the start date. This way, you start to drive consistency in your overall marketing look and feel and the points of execution. I call this ‘the drum beat’.?It also alleviates the stress of “we’re launching this. We need a 10-bullet blog post and social media ads designed on why it’s so great. By tomorrow”. No one can do effective work with this approach. The other benefit is that once you have a plan in place and you’ve got a stack of blogs/assets prepared, your team can then focus on more proactive day-to-day tasks, so you can better respond to Beyoncé mentioning your brand in a new song. So, ‘fast’ is better served by being a bit slower upfront.?
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Cheap?
Sometimes, you are happy with the brown lettuce in a supermarket’s ‘50% off’ aisle. But the supermarket didn’t buy them like that. They were all nice and green just a short time ago. I’m not sure if this is the best analogy for cheaply produced marketing, but you get the point; no one really wants brown lettuce. Yet this is what you’re requesting when you skimp on your advertising. The core purpose of advertising is to get people’s attention. It’s not easy to do that, especially in this day and age. So you need strategic thinking to find a niche, voice, and an audience of customers and prospective customers who care. I work primarily with B2B brands, and often I get told I’m proposing B2C ideas. But who isn’t a consumer? Do you think you’re selling to an ‘entity’? You’re not. You’re always selling to a person. That person is often busy. Your solution to their problem is often maybe the 5th or 6th priority on their to-do list, even if they are specifically hunting for a product or service that does what you do. So, you’re competing with your competitors for your potential customers’ attention and their day job. How well do you think you’ll stand out if you spend no money trying to find the best way to get their attention? Don’t take my word for it, have a scroll through your social channels or a website, or watch the TV and tell me how many times you actually notice an advert. Please let me know the last one you noticed in the comments below; I’ll tell you how much the company spent on it (hint: it wasn’t cheap).?
Good
The Holy Grail. They hand out awards for ‘good’.
What does it take to create good marketing? People think it’s a bit of a mystery, but there’s quite a tight process that includes: planning, strategy, creative ideation, definition and then effective execution. These all take good forethought, time and resource (see where I’m going?) to be effective. Marketing must clearly understand its target audience, its motivations and needs, and how our product or service addresses them. It needs a strong value proposition, defining why anyone should care, especially from an emotional perspective. Most organisations miss this. You can take 30 minutes to explain your company to people face to face, but we don’t have this luxury in general, so we need to nail the ‘why’ and be able to tell people what we do quickly and that they really should care. It also needs to be consistent. Often people change their marketing with the change of the wind. But much research shows that a company often changes its marketing before potential customers even have the chance to see it. Once you’ve picked a strategy and it’s working, stick with it. Both business and consumer customers love consistency, and ‘good’ work should have longevity baked right into it. Finally, we need to prove that it’s worked. My first article is here for more: Marketing Measurement Isn’t Everything .
So the choice is a fallacy. You can’t have two of the three; you need the first two to get the third. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying or trying to get you to understand the critical principle of great marketing in a roundabout way.
Thanks for reading, Find out more about what I do here:?www.wforty4.com
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