All 4 will ensure smooth sailing of your marketing endeavors.
If you’ve ever run a campaign that failed and you’ve been frustrated by it because you don’t know where it went wrong, I can virtually guarantee that you missed out on one of the 4 M’s of marketing. You’ve tried different things like social media, search engine optimization, pay per click, direct mail, telemarketing, trade shows and it failed.
When you get these 4 M’s right in a marketing campaign, you’re guaranteed success.
And most failed campaigns, you either missed one of these 4 M’s or you came up short, meaning you didn’t have it in there, you didn’t have it strategically correct. Think about it, it’s like the way these 4 M’s work is like the four legs on a table. And if one of the legs is missing, you’ve got a very unstable table or at least a rocky one. And that’s not good.
So, the four M’s of marketing:
The first one is going to be market.
Now, what I mean by “market” is the list or the prospect that you’re targeting and you’ve got to start here. You’ve got to think about “Who is my slam dunk ideal customer?” And if you don’t know, you’re going to struggle with marketing.
Because the WHO that you’re trying to target, the market, is going to determine everything.
So, for example, if you’re selling to end users or home users — which I have some clients that do that, most of my clients sell B2B — but if you’re selling to home users, I’m going to use a different approach to marketing than if I’m going to be selling to the CEO of a bank or the CIO of a hospital.
Because those are two entirely different markets. They have different budgets, they have different concerns, different needs, there’s different buying criteria.
So the first thing you’ve got to get super clear on is market, because where your marketing campaign may have missed is that the list that you targeted, the media, which is going to be another M that you used, is not one that your target market pays attention to. So market is number one.
The second one is going to be your message.
What are you saying in your ad that is going to get their attention? And again, you could have a really good target market and have that dialed in…
But if your message is off, if it’s boring, if it’s uninteresting, if it’s confusing, and I see a lot of ads, where people are trying to be cute and clever and they completely miss the mark because when prospects see it, they don’t really understand what you do and who you do it for.
So the message has got to be extremely compelling, and part of that is going to be the offer you made. The headline that you use and the copy that you use is really important.
The next one is going to be media.
And media is simply the method in which you take your message and communicate it to your target market. So media can be an email, a website, a Facebook post. Media is a telemarketing call. Even a direct mail piece or a trade show.
And the problem? This is the big problem with most IT firms: when they start thinking about marketing, media is what they think of first.
So they go, “Oh, we need to get more clients around here. I don’t know. Should we do Facebook? Should we hire an SEO specialist? Maybe we should try pay per click?” And they start here without really getting clear on who they want as a customer and what they’re going to say.
Because if the message and the market are wrong, then the media won’t matter. So you’ve got to start with market, then you go to message, and then you’ve got to pick the correct media.
And again, going back to my example, if I have a client that is selling to the CEO of a bank or a hospital, you know, Facebook advertising might not be the best way to target that particular market or those particular prospects. That doesn’t mean Facebook is wrong. It just means that customer isn’t on Facebook looking for his next or her next IT company. So you’ve got to have your media strategy right.
The other thing I’ll add on is you want multimedia. Because again, if you’re only doing email, you’re only doing Facebook, you’re only doing one thing, you’re missing out on a huge chunk of the market.
And the final fourth M that you’ve got to have right is math.
And what I mean by math is that you’ve got to understand response percentages; you’ve got to understand what a client is worth. So people ask me all the time, “Robin, what should I spend on marketing?” And they want some kind of easy formula, like 5 percent of gross revenue or something like that.
And that is completely arbitrary because before I can tell you what to spend on marketing, I have to know what a client’s worth. I need to know the lifetime value. I’ve got to know the return on investment for that particular asset.
Because to get a customer, you must think like an investor, it is an asset, so you’ve got to know math.
So, for example, if you are running Google pay per click, it’s helpful to know that getting a 2% to 3% click-through-rate is considered very good. It’s also good to know that if you get on that landing page, about a 20% conversion rate is considered pretty good. The other thing you’ve got to know is a lot of those leads are not going to be qualified. It’s not uncommon for 50% of the leads you get to be unqualified.
So you’ve got to do the math all the way through and say, “Okay, we’ve got to get this many clicks to get this much conversion and 50% of clicks are not going to be worth anything. And then we’ve got whatever’s left over and then we convert those.” So you’ve got to do that math; you’ve got to do that backwards planning.
And again, a lot of IT firms don’t know anything about their marketing metrics.
They don’t know anything about conversion, they don’t know lifetime value; they don’t know their sales funnel metrics. And when you don’t know the math, you’re going to make bad decisions. You’re going to give up on campaigns that are actually working because you’re not paying attention to metrics, you’re not looking at long-term value.
So again, if you’ve ever had a campaign that didn’t work, you probably screwed up one of these 4 M’s of marketing.
And so what I put together is a masterclass for you where I get into a deep dive in these four areas and I’m going to walk you through how to pick a target market, what a good message is when you’re targeting new prospective customers. I’m going to get into media strategies, and I’m going to talk about math. And I’m actually going to give you metrics, marketing metrics, for other IT firms so you start to get a sense for what good marketing is and what you can expect.
So, click here and get access to this masterclass instantly.
And I’m telling you this is going to be a game changer for you, because if you can fix these four things, there’s not a single campaign that you can run that won’t work. And I don’t care if you’re using Google pay per click. I don’t care if it’s email marketing, direct mail, telemarketing. It doesn’t matter.
