Many business owners want to improve their marketing:
- They want to attract more qualified leads.
- Convert more leads into paying customers.
- Resell to existing and old customers
A fundamental way to improve any activity is by using the Stop Start More Less Process
I have already looked at how this can be applied to how you can improve the way you manage your time to get more achieved.
>>> The Stop Start More Less Matrix For Time Management
The same principles also apply to differentiating your products and services cost effectively.
>> The Stop Start More Less Process For Differentiation Of Products And Services
And in this article, I explain how the process can improve your marketing results.
What Is The Stop Start More Less Process And How Does It Apply To Marketing?
If you want to improve your results and the return on investment and return on time for your marketing, there are only four things you can do:
- Stop doing marketing activities that don’t work enough to meet a minimum threshold of success. They consume time, energy and money but don’t give you more customers who buy more, more often.
. - Do less of the things that work a bit but don’t give you the results you hoped for when you started.
. - Do more of the tactics that work well, using the time and money you’ve saved from stopping some activities and doing less of others.
. - Start using new ideas to generate and convert leads into customers. This may involve making changes to your existing marketing techniques.
The other alternative is to continue to do what you do but change is only created through the stop start more less process.
Market plus Message plus Media
Effective marketing is all about sending the right message to the right people using the most suitable media method of communications.
I sometimes hear statements like “We’ve tried direct mail (or the Internet or advertising or social media etc) but it doesn’t work for us.” That may well have been because the media was right but the wrong message was sent or it reached the wrong people.
Your Time And Money Are Constrained
This stop start process recognises the real world reality that you only have a limited amount of time and money you want to spend on marketing.
It encourages you to make the best use of these two resources by measuring the results of what you’re doing so you can make informed decisions.
Your success rates will highlight marketing that can be stopped or reduced.
Too often I see advice that suggests business owners should do more marketing – to advertise, to have campaigns to get more traffic to their websites, to “do social media” or to be more active on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or to add an extra channel.
This all takes time and/or money… and it’s probably time and money you don’t want to spend on marketing.
The Stop Start More Less process encourages you to find that time and money from what you’re already doing that isn’t working.
Let’s look in more detail at doing more and doing something new.
Do More Of What Is Working
One of the ways I help clients is to encourage them to do more of the lead generation and conversion activities that are working for them.
It sounds obvious, written there in black and white.
It’s not necessarily so obvious when you want more customers.
It’s much less risky than trying to do something else although some find marketing that works boring and predictable… and see that as a bad thing. I don’t and hopefully you don’t either.
A twist on doing more is to go back to what used to work in the past but, for whatever reason, you stopped doing.
Business owners and managers often get bored with promotions and marketing methods well before the target audience and stop, even if the messages are still working. This happens because the business owner is very aware of each and every message sent out while the potential customers only see what’s relevant to them at any particular time.
We are bombarded with hundreds or even thousands of marketing messages every day and our minds filter out everything that isn’t obviously connected to our problems and opportunities. As consumers, this is a good thing for our sanity but as marketers, it is frustrating.
If you’re not sure what I mean, try to think what advertisements you saw the last time you watched TV or read a newspaper or magazine. If an advertisement doesn’t make any impression, we won’t remember it and, even if we remember the advert, we may not remember the name of the business.
Anyway, you may have stopped a marketing campaign that still has the potential to be successful now and in the future.
Try Something New
It’s exciting to try something new.
You can vary:
- Your marketing message. >>> Positioning Statements (your big offer) or small offers designed to create immediate action.
. - Your lead generation and conversion system.>>> One Step, Two Step And Three Step Lead Generation And Conversion
. - The way your marketing message is carried to your target customers i.e. the marketing media you use.>>> Where To Promote Your Business To Your Target Customers
However trying new things in marketing is risky.
I’ve read that even the top copywriters in the world expect more marketing campaigns to fail than to succeed. Their definition of failure might be different to ours e.g. a campaign that doesn’t meet a targeted return on investment rather than one that doesn’t get any responses but the principle is the same. New marketing campaigns are risky, even for the top pros.
This is why it is a good idea to test two alternatives to see which works best, stop doing the one that isn’t doing as well and try another improvement idea.
Your Marketing Can Be Improved
The Stop Start More Less process gives you a system to use to tweak and improve your marketing.
What you do needs to be justified by the results.You should be tracking your marketing to see where leads are coming from and which leads are converted into customers and perhaps even grade the customers.
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