Are your marketing expectations too high?

One of the most frequent comments that I hear when talking to businesses about their marketing problems is this:  ‘My marketing isn’t delivering enough.’   Now that’s a pretty broad statement to make.  There are any number of reasons that a company might feel that their marketing isn’t delivering but one of the most common is simply that they are expecting far too much.

First of all I would be looking to ascertain exactly how a company is measuring the success (or failure) of their marketing campaigns.  All too often I find that marketing isn’t actually being measured, instead it seems to be  a case of putting all of the effort into actually pushing the material out the door but not actually tracking results.  Not only is that a waste of time, resource and valuable funds, it also makes the entire marketing exercise pointless.  You must measure the results of each campaign, that’s the only way of tracking where your leads are coming from and improving the chances of success from your marketing activity.

Another area that I would explore is exactly what the business objectives for the company are.  You have to have these in place in order to establish exactly how much marketing activity you will require over the course of a year.  If you’re expecting to generate 10 new customers each month and all you are doing is attending the odd networking event combined with issuing say 20 prospecting letters at a time then you simply won’t achieve the 10 customers you need each month.  The general rule of thumb is to expect a 1 - 2%  response rate as a direct result of any marketing campaign, that’s not a lot!  Either your objectives are unrealistic or you will need to spend more on your marketing to meet them.

I would also want to know what kind of timescales the company works to with regard marketing activity. There seems to be a common misconception that a website can be up and running in hours or that an event can be organised in days and achieve good results. 

Whilst there are tools out there that will help you get a basic website up and running in hours, you have to question the quality of the image that a template based website will project to your target audience.  Fine for some companies but if you are targeting professional businesses you have to ensure that your own brand, including your website is of equal quality.

And yes you can pull off an event in a relatively short space of time but it’s unlikely that it will bring the same results as one that has been carefully planned to ensure the best possible return.  When it comes to planning your campaigns, from concept to delivery, I generally suggest that whatever timeframe you have in mind you should double it, then you’re hitting a realistic zone!