I go to a lot of marketing events.
Conferences, trade shows & mastermind groups.
If you do this you’ll find 2 distinctly different groups of people and you can tell them apart by how they talk.
I think of them as the No-Nonsense Group and the Baffle-You-With-BS Group.
The No-Nonsense group will talk about:
– Response rates
– Conversion rates
– Split Testing
– Lifetime Value of a customer
– Return On Investment (ROI)
These are all easily measurable on a daily basis.
And SHOULD be measured on a daily basis! Weekly basis at minimum.
(I’ll be covering which daily numbers hypnotists should track in a future article)
Now, the Baffle-You-With-BS group will talk about:
– enhancing your presence
– customer engagement
– brand awareness
– relevance in social media
– image consistency across verticals
None of which can be accurately measured. Guessed at maybe.
Running a business on guesswork is a recipe for failure.
This is smoke & mirrors marketing.
On the surface it sounds and looks impressive, but there is no way to know if it actually brings customers in the door.
So you might wonder… how can the 2nd group survive?
Easy.
Most large corporations are obsessed with their IMAGE.
And they cling to the belief that beating their BRAND into your brain means you will one day buy something.
Maybe this strategy works and maybe not.
But you and I can’t afford to run a business that way. We don’t have billions to build ‘awareness’ and hope it works.
The serious business owners I mastermind with KNOW their numbers.
* They know which traffic sources work best.
* They know how many new unique visitors they get every day and how many of those end up becoming customers.
* They know on average how much a new customer will purchase.
And they scare the crap out of the Baffle-You-With-BS
Group.
You can too.
If someone starts talking about brand engagement or social media presence to you, ask them this simple question:
“How can I measure this in terms of direct sales?”
Then be quiet.
What you hear next will be quite amusing!
P.S. In January of 2000 Pets.com had the most popular Super Bowl Ad. 11 months later they went out of business.
A few years later, Sales Genie ran an ad voted one of the worst Super Bowl ads ever. But they laughed all the way to the bank having made over $18,000,000 in REVENUE directly measured from the
ad.
This is a real world example of the difference in thinking between the 2 groups.
Click here to see video of both ads on my blog
