Mike Cooper
It's an old saying, yet I think at some point we are all guilty of this. We don’t make a back-up plan because we are confident our original plan will succeed.
History clearly teaches us this is not usually the case. Most great ideas that have succeeded had failures and modifications along the way. In other words, people spread their apples into different bins to find the one that proved to be the best fruit and then measured and adjusted to develop the successful idea we know today.
Keep in mind there were 5,127 prototypes of the Dyson Vacuum before it hit store shelves. (Have you ever used one? Slick!)
After he mastered the vacuum world, Dyson then moved on to create other products such as fans and hand dryers (the air blade), again showing that we should not keep all our apples in one bin.
The same scenario applies to marketing your business.
Relying on one specific marketing stream is not a smart way to go. At any given time you should be combining multiple avenues to market your business. If you find something has a high conversion rate and is giving you a great return on investment (ROI), start putting more apples into it! However, never take all the apples from the other bins. Periodically you need to analyze your marketing efforts. Adjust your resources so that you are putting more into the ones that are providing the best ROI. The key point is to explore different marketing methods (bins) to see how much fruit they bring you.
Everything Good Must Come to an End
I love apples! But the season will end and there is only so long apples will stay good in my fridge. With some fine tuning I could preserve them longer and the same is true with your marketing.
If you find something that works, fine tune it periodically to get a little more out of it or to make it last just a bit longer, but understand that eventually it will end.
Perhaps the best example of this is phone book advertising.
I know many home service businesses that relied on the phone book for their marketing. In fact, many of them put all of their apples into that marketing plan, and it worked! I owned another company that, at one time, relied on yellow page advertising, although I still tried other avenues. Being a marketing guy, I saw change coming.
At that time most small businesses were just starting to explore websites, and no one had a clue who Mark Zuckerberg was (creator of Facebook).
Those who didn’t take note were heavily impacted financially, or worse yet, ended up closing their doors.
Don’t get me wrong.
The phone book can still be a useful tool for some businesses, but its ROI for many has dropped significantly as the Internet and social media have exploded.
With the introduction of Google ads, search engine results, Facebook ads, email marketing and other online marketing tools, people had to remove some of their apples from yellow page advertising and start putting them into other bins.
Which bins for our apples?
Do a little research and find out what’s working for others, as well as what’s new and trendy. The important thing is to test and measure each bin. This is where most people fail. They forget to measure their marketing results and don’t actually know which bin is most effective.
Also know that just because something didn’t work once, doesn’t mean it can’t work in the future with some fine-tuning, testing and measuring.
Next column, I will get into some creative ways to measure results.
Mike Cooper is the owner of Black Mountain Media.
Send Mike a note at: mike@blackmountainmedia.ca
See what Black Mountain does at: www.blackmountainmedia.ca
You can also call: 778-214-0519
