The Tools You Don't Need To Be Successful

The tools you don't need to be successful!

If you thought this was going to an article about what tools you need to avoid in the marketplace, you can stop reading now! I discussed earlier this week, the tools we use to execute our own digital marketing, but that is not the focus here, planning is! It continues to amaze me how many people I meet on a daily basis who are what I deem to be "in business despite themselves" What I mean by that is that they don't have a plan. It stems from people having too much product focus within their business, if you read the book: "Who Moved My Cheese" by Spencer Johnson, it talks about death by 1,000 cuts in a business. A business may have started out by becoming an agent of distribution for a particular product or simply latched onto a trend in days gone by but now are seeing tougher times. To survive Johnson uses a metaphor to suggest that each business should be in the business of providing what the market wants and thus reacting appropriately to that market. I suppose it's a round-about way of saying you are customer focused! The reality is that people don't like to be sold to and that your primary drivers for success today are becoming more and more front loaded in the marketing department. This comes down to two questions you need to address internally and represnet the new RULES!

1. How am I positioning myself?
2. Am I providing helpful content to my audience?

There is also a secret 2a. above which should be "Am I making sure I'm not selling?" The objective of this exercise is to be the kind of business or website (one in the same) that people gravitate towards.

While your role as a marketer might be to execute on a campaign try not to think micro but rather understand how this fits into the broader company objectives, as in macro. No doubt you will have pains in your role that are challenging your ability to execute. Maybe it's that your email platform keeps breaking or doesn't have x feature, but rather than consider what product you should use to fix this ask yourself, is my current process to conduct marketing activities working for me to produce results? Here it might be "Is my email even well constructed" One of the questions I always ask is, "Walk me through the KPI's that keep you awake a night!" In this case, a lack of KPI's could be a red flag here! While a marketing funnel represents a fundamental building block it's rarely understood or used from my experience. It's really this simple, the RULES are: 

1. How visitors does my website get each month?
2. How many of those visitors convert into leads and why?
3. How many of those leads turn into qualified opportunities?
4. How many of those opportunities close as customers?

In the past three months alone I have been at no fewer that eleven leadership keynotes hosted by some impressive speakers, at the end of the speech in every case a member of the audience got up and asked in varying manners: "So what product should I buy here?"..... Nope, nope, nope.... you just don't get it! Think before you act! You don't need a tool, you're the tool! I address the definition of your customers in my earlier article on defining your customer and positioning factors within that construct. Yes, you need to be good at what you do but ultimately the goal is to solve the problem your customer has come to your website for. That's not to say that you won't buy anything, but you can't address the solution space by simply buying something and not defining and owning the problem space first. 

Yes I am more than happy to walk through some of the elements you need to execute on your digital marketing but I personally won't work with people whom I don't think will be successful. You might argue that Digital Marketing is "so hot right now", but that's just because it's new!I believe strongly that we need to get over the glitz and the glamor and get down to the business of hard work and goal definition.

It's not only integrating digital marketing with other marketing activities but actually with revenue and the bottom line of the business. This week I had dinner with a friend in the Saas space. He is launching their new product at a global event in Florida imminently. As for their online presence, the last time I spoke they had put up a single web page with clouds for their company name and that was in the middle of it! Yep, that's it! Typically when most software companies start they want to test the market and gain some feedback but, rather than grow organically online and get some lower cost leads, they decided this approach wasn't for them! They want to spend big on the front end and travel across contents to launch. By the way, they are excellent at what they do and their cloud product is world class. Their issue, as I hear with most businesses is they'll say "not enough people know about us". Their strategy at this event was to be simple, my friend said "we'll print business cards, hand them out at the event and people will come to our website" So I became inquisitive and said "so sounds like you've added more to your website since we spoke last, what will people do when they arrive there?".. he replied back "oh nothing, that's still just for show" to show what I wondered to myself! To be slightly fair to him they do have their contact details amongst those clouds on their website but they are now assuming that people will be ready to contact them having looked at one business card from the event! Have they broken any of the two rules above, you tell me?