The Marketing Fallacy

“Just as ‘You cannot serve two masters’ without hating one and loving the other, so, equally, you cannot simultaneously use direct response marketing and brand marketing… unless there is clear separation between the two strands.”

~ Debra Hilton

The Experiment that Failed

Last year one of my clients hired a LinkedIn marketing specialist to manage their outreach and switched from the Direct Response | Invitation |Attraction marketing model to the more traditional bombard with connection requests, invite people to events, and hope that enough people show up to make sales. Their idea was that they needed someone to manage the front-end outreach so that their existing marketing could have the same impact on a bigger scale.

In principle, I 100% agreed with their goal and suggested some firms whose methods would fit with their existing messaging, but they made a different choice.

Scale With Care

The original strategy was delivering 30 qualified leads per month of whom 25 converted to closed business (providing a monthly new income in the six-figures and an average continuity of > 36 months).

I understand the desire to scale and ramp up your lead flow BUT it’s important to remember that your attraction process is just ONE PART of the equation. If your lead nurture process is based on direct response and investing in people who are actually interested in what you offer, then it probably won’t work for cold leads.

Congruency is key!

Full Disclosure:?I don’t know about you, but I absolutely hate the assumption that just because I’m connected to you on LinkedIn, I’m anxious to attend your webinar, schedule a call, or use your services. I may do any or all of the above, but don’t presume and send me repeated messages.

Unintended Consequences

Anyway… Overlaying the new strategy on the existing one, this client ended up with 20 leads who were a mixture of qualified and unqualified, of whom only 5 converted. They were shocked by the drop in numbers and value, I was stunned that they had not anticipated this.

After 3 months of this, they split their channels and went back to a direct response stream managed by the client as previously and what I call the ‘cold broadcast’ method as a separate stream with some fairly strict separation on which contacts received the latter.

Unfortunately, damage has been done to their pool of qualified prospects because of the trust erosion and the new business numbers are still down from the original average, but the cold broadcast numbers almost make up the difference in terms of new and hopefully the lead flow will continue to grow and the clients from the new stream will stay as long (or even longer) as those delivered by the original method.

The Lesson is Obvious…

By all means test new methods!

You should always have at least one new initiative running.

BUT… don’t mess with what is working.

It is a fallacy to assume that your existing materials and campaigns will be just as effective when they are applied in a different context or methodology as they currently are and it is?incredibly foolish?to assume that you can break a relationship and then resume it where you left off with no repercussions.