Part 9 – Marketing Without Action Is Dead
I hate to see money wasted. And I hate it even more when it’s the money of hard driving small business owners or professionals. And no where is this waste more prevalent than in marketing, where these business owners try to emulate institutional marketing. Here’s a quick example to illustrate my point.
The other day I was watching a tape of CSI. As I was fast-forwarding through some commercials, a beautiful scene in one of the ads caught my eye. I even skipped back on my DVR to watch the entire commercial on the hard drive. That’s unusual since the whole reason for recording the show to begin with is to save time not watching commercials.
Pretty powerful commercial you might think. But, that would depend on your perspective.
You see, as a viewer, the ad was a visual delight. There were gorgeous mountains in the background with rolling fields of grass waving in the wind in the valley below. Then a thunderous sound became louder and louder as the camera panned across to focus in on a herd of wild mustangs galloping across a field.
All of a sudden the herd comes to a screeching stop and the horses stare to the side. The camera pans again and there is what caused them to stop dead in their tracks. A glistening black 4×4 truck with a man working nearby. The man smiles at the mustangs, turns toward his truck, back towards the mustangs — and they rear up and gallop on.
Wow, impressive. This truck can get a herd of wild mustangs to stop and stare.
Was it entertaining? Yes. Visually stimulating? Sure, if you find the awesome Rocky Mountains awe inspiring.
But does any of that motivate you as the viewer to take action right then and there while you’re emotionally charged, if you even are? With most conventional advertising — it doesn’t.
Maybe a big Fortune 500 company with tens of millions of dollars in their advertising budget can afford that sort of creative license and not get any direct response. But I would guess that you can’t afford that luxury. Good guess, right?
All this brings us to the eleventh principle of this series, and marketing without action is dead in the water.
Principle 11. Direct response marketing is the only type of marketing you want to invest in.
Every ad, every sales letter, commercial, promotion and news release you produce should be geared to getting your prospects or clients to respond in some way. They must take some kind of action. The type of action is dependent on you’re looking to achieve. Here are four examples:
- If your goal is to generate leads, you’ll want a prospect to call to make an appointment for a consultation.
- Maybe you want an interested party to email you to request specific information.
-If your product or service lends itself to single-step selling, you’ll want them to place an order.
- If it’s publicity you’re after, you’ll want to time your press releases with the coverage of a challenging situation by the media. A challenging situation your product or service can solve.
No matter what response you’re looking for with your marketing, you must always remember that you are looking for a prospect to take some sort of action right then and there.
There are two important reasons why you would demand this of your advertising.
1. Reason number one is because action that can be attributed to one of your advertising pieces is the only way you will be able to measure how effective each area of your marketing campaign is. And to be as successful as possible, it’s essential to be able to tell precisely how well or how poorly each of your marketing efforts performed.
It’s not enough to know that your sales are up over the same period from the previous year. You must know specifically why they’re up.
· Which specific marketing methods are superstars?
· Which are so-so when it comes to being profitable?
· Which are slugs draining cash away from your business?
Without this critical information, you’ll continue to dump your hard earned cash into worthless efforts. That’s money that would be better invested in adding to your most result-producing performers.
2. Reason number two is more obvious, but equally as important. It’s because you want to build relationships with your clients or would be clients. You want to learn more about their needs, develop trust, build rapport and prove to them you have their best interest at heart. How can you do that if you never communicate with them? Quite simply, you can’t. When a prospect responds though, you have that chance.
From my introductory story you may get the impression that I think emotions and “intangibles” have nothing to do with outstanding advertising and result-generating marketing.
Perish the thought! Nothing could be further from the truth.
Drawing emotion out of your prospects through your advertising and marketing is a crucial component of successful marketing. The vast majority of people buy based on emotional needs. (Yes — even you. You might not like to think so, but watch yourself in the next major buying decision and see if emotions don’t play a major role in your decision making process.)
There’s not time to go into detail on the critical role emotions play in quickly generating action on the part of prospects. In the course curriculum in the Business Owners Coaching Club you’ll learn the critical importance of emotional buying triggers, behavioral preferences, motivational values, and a host of other influence-based factors that you must take into consideration for successful small business marketing. But for now, I do want to be sure you walk away today with some guidelines you can put into use to supercharge your marketing efforts.
There are two simple guidelines that will serve you well if you dedicate them to your long-term memory.
These “rules,” when put into practice, will assure you that every marketing effort you choose to invest in from here on out will give you solid results and business boosting action on the part of prospects and clients.
1. Each and every one of your marketing efforts must be completely measurable. Measurable means your marketing efforts that your prospects or clients take some kind of action based on your marketing. Measuring and improving the results of your advertising methods will allow you to cut your costs significantly while getting much better results for every marketing dollar you invest.
2. If you want the greatest ROI on every dollar you invest in growing your client base through marketing and advertising you must strive to constantly eliminate dead weight. If a marketing format doesn’t produce profit, either modify it and test again or drop it. Period! If you’re not measuring results, you’re wasting your own marketing dollars.
Enjoy — and stay tuned for part 10 of the 12 Laws of Small Business Marketing Success series.
John-Paul Micek is known as the “Click-and-Mortar Business Coach” by business owners around the world thanks to members of the Business Owner’s Coaching Club™. He’s a published author and weekly columnist for the business section of the Honolulu Star Bulletin, and a managing partner with the international small business coaching company RPM Success Group Inc.®

The © Copyright to all audio, video, images, and text are held by RPM Success Group Inc.® and licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Share and Enjoy:
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.