Marketing Lessons From A Prospect
Are you struggling to grow your business and not sure why? There are a number of marketing mistakes that hold businesses back. And today, I'm going to share a conversation I recently had with a prospect that highlights a few of these. And my hope in sharing this is, one, that you know you're not alone if you're struggling, and two, that you have options to overcome it.
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Marketing Lessons From A Prospect
Are you struggling to grow your business and not sure why? There are a number of marketing mistakes that hold businesses back. And today, I'm going to share a conversation I recently had with a prospect that highlights a few of these. And my hope in sharing this is, one, that you know you're not alone if you're struggling, and two, that you have options to overcome it.
Hi, I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing, where we believe you must remove your revenue roadblocks. Get where you want to go faster. Marketing shouldn't be difficult. Thanks so much for taking the time to tune in. Let's jump into this.
So this conversation, by the way, is not unique. So I'm sharing this. Do not listen to this thinking that this is a unique conversation. I have conversations all the time like this. There might be a slightly different flavor to it, but the base of the conversation is the same.
So here's the story behind this prospect. They, one, have grown within a local market, but they're reaching a point of saturation. They've saturated the market. They're not going to do much more business within the existing market. They have grown primarily through referrals and relationships in that local market, but it's not the lead gen and the new clients are not consistent and they are not predictable. They have been doing some cold outreach that's generating some leads, but again, it's not super consistent. Hit or miss. And it's not something that you would just go, oh, my gosh, this is an amazing lead generation tactic for us. They've tried other varied marketing tactics with little success, dabbling in this or that, hoping one of these things is going to work. And because they have reached a point of saturation in their current market, they want to expand into another market to continue to grow, but they don't have a plan. They're not sure how to do it. They're stuck. And this particular client was doing between $4 to $6 million in top-line revenue. So not extremely small, not huge, but a pretty good Big-size business. Most people would look at that and go, Wow, $4 to $6 million? That's a pretty good business. And it is. They've been in business for a long time. They're doing a lot of things right or a lot of things well. I am not bringing up this example to say that they're not doing things well because they're doing a lot of things well, but they're struggling on the marketing side of things.
Marketing Mistakes From The Prospect
So what are the problems, the mistakes they're making? The first one is a lack of a clear strategy. The mistake they're making here is they're jumping into tactics without a solid strategy, without a foundation in place, without the the fuel they need for the marketing vehicles they're going to use. But instead, they're just throwing marketing tactics against the wall, hoping something is going to stick. And hope is not strategy. Throwing stuff up against a wall does not work. So the solution was emphasizing the importance of starting with a clear marketing strategy. We've got to understand our target market. We need to create buyer personas or buyer avatars or ideal client profiles. Those are all the same different words for the same different terms for the same thing. And we need to set clear objectives. These are crucial before actually implementing tactics. Target market, creating those buyer personas, then creating a message that's actually going to attract and engage those people and having clear objectives of what we want to accomplish before we just jump into marketing vehicles hoping they're going to work. That's the first common problem I see, and it's a I don't know what problem this prospect was experiencing.
Second thing is an overreliance on referrals. The vast majority of businesses are generating the majority of their leads through referrals. There's nothing wrong with that. Referrals are very high quality leads. They convert at a high rate, but they're not scalable and they're not predictable or consistent. And so relying on referrals and not having other lead generation tactics to support that is like riding a unicycle. If that tire goes flat, you are hosed. And I don't want that for you. I don't think any of you want that for your own business. They're great, but again, they're not scalable, and we need to have other marketing channels generating consistent leads. That doesn't mean you have to be everywhere, but having three or four consistent lead generation tactics evens things out. You're not reliant too heavily on any one. It changes your business from riding a unicycle to being on a three or four wheeler. If one of the wheels goes flat, you're still going to get where you want to go. It may take a little bit longer, but you're still going to get there. So the solution here is diversifying right into other lead gen channels as I touched on. That could be content marketing, it could be search engine optimization, paid ads, email marketing, any other digital marketing strategies or offline strategies to attract new prospects. All of the these marketing vehicles can work. You just have to create a plan of what's going to work best for our business, where we are and where we want to get to and what our budget is. And then let's start testing these vehicles to determine what's going to work best for us. But we've got to diversify into other marketing channels. We cannot be 100 % reliant on referrals.
Now, third mistake was in this was insufficient marketing budget. Operating with a marketing budget that is too low to achieve significant results, right? It's not a good place to be. And so many business owners are hesitant to invest in marketing. They've been burned before. But if you let that stop you, it's a roadblock. It's preventing you from getting where you want to go. We've all been dumped before. We've all lost people that we love. We were in relationships and you got divorced or you got dumped or whatever happened. But did you let that prevent you from getting into another relationship? Some people do, and that's sad. And that's the same thing that's happening here when people are like, I'm not going to invest in marketing. But you have If you want to grow, you have to have a budget. It has to be enough. This particular client, like I said, was doing 4 to 6 million dollars a year in revenue, and they were spending less than $20,000 a year on marketing. That is not enough. That isn't anywhere close to enough, especially if you want to expand into another market. Now, if they were good with where they were at, and they didn't want to grow, that's It's a totally different thing. But they wanted to expand into another market. They weren't even spending 2% of their top-line revenue. 2% of top-line revenue would have been $80,000 to $120,000 a year in marketing budget. That's a whole hell of a lot different than less than $20,000, isn't it? So if you want to grow, you are going to have to find marketing dollars somewhere, right? You've got to open up budget somewhere so that you can invest in marketing if you want to grow. If you don't want to grow, that's fine. Nobody's twisting your arm. But you can't reach out to any marketing provider and say, oh, we want to 2X our business or 5X our business or whatever it is, grow by 30% in the next year and not have a budget for those people to work with. This isn't magic. You need to have money to invest in it. So This particular client, they had a grossly underfunded marketing budget. Their expectations were not realistic at all. At all. So that's just the reality of it.
Conclusion
So Let's recap those again. They lacked a clear strategy, a clear marketing strategy. They were overreliant on referrals, and they had a completely insufficient marketing budget to achieve the objectives that they wanted to achieve.
So if any of these are hitting home, hopefully this has been helpful for you. Hopefully it's opened your eyes a little bit. And like I said, it's been helpful. If you've got further questions, You want some outside eyes on your particular situation, reach out to us, rialtomarketing.com. That's RIALTOmarketing.com. The other resource for you is over at revenueroadblockscorecard.com. When we work with clients, we help them remove nine revenue roadblocks that stand in the way of accelerating growth. If you want to know which of the nine is slowing down your growth right now and some of the things you can do to address those, you can do that at revenueroadblockscorecard.com. It takes less than five minutes. Customized report, tons of value there. So go check it out if you're interested, and we'll go from there. So hopefully you found that helpful. Thank you for watching, listening. I appreciate you doing so. And until next time, take care.