Systemize Your Marketing
Read this Before you Hire an Agency - or a Person
[Warning - this post will be nerdier than usual.]
The Output of Marketing is Leads
And leads are the input to your sales system. To systemize your production of leads, let's look at the four parts of the marketing system: Trigger, Input, Transformation, Output. (These are the parts of any system [More here].
Trigger - A marketing system is usually triggered by the calendar. Going into a slow season you'll ramp up your marketing. Or if there's a schedule of tradeshows and that's one of your channels that will be the trigger of many of your marketing efforts. Or maybe you just do it constantly.
What about the budget? When I hear people asking how much they should spend on marketing, I know that they haven't systemized their marketing or their sales process. With robust systems producing these two outputs the limitation will be your capacity to fulfill what you sell, not your budget.
Input - You must start your marketing with knowledge of these three inputs. This comes from Justin Roff-Marsh's book The Machine: A Radical Approach to the Design of the Sales Function (pg 148).
All promotional campaigns have three fundamental ingredients:
1. an offer, the basic proposition the campaign presents
2. an audience, the set of individuals to which the campaign is targeted; and
3. communication, how the offer communicated—the creative execution.
Transformation - This is the work that transforms the input into the output. It's basically repeatedly transmitting your offer to your audience via the communication channels that they respond to.
Output - Leads; a connection with people who could become customers.
The Input is the Most Important Part of this System
Of those four parts, the input is the one that most people get wrong. It's also the hardest. Let's break it down. Roff-Marsh lists the three parts of the input in the order of importance; the offer is by far the most important part. If your offer doesn't resonate nothing else matters.
However, I'm going to discuss them in the order that you usually use when you develop a marketing system: Audience / Offer / Communication
Your Audience is a Set of Individuals
I love that Roff-Marsh defined it that way. Even if you think you sell to organizations you don't. Purchases in companies, universities, governments, non-profits, and the like are made by people. Who are these people? Prospects are people who could become customers. If they can't become customers then you're wasting time, money, and effort marketing to them.
Have you defined your ideal customer? That's where you start. Of course you'll often sell to less than ideal customers but why not aim for the ones you want the most.
Who else is involved in the buying decisions?
If you sell to consumers (B2C) then you're selling to people who spend their own money on your offering. If you sell to people in organizations (B2B) then they are people who are often (not always) spending money that's not their own. This is important because it changes the reasons they buy.
But wait. There's More. Most purchases aren't made by a single individual. In B2C sales, they may need approval from or at least be influenced by family members. In B2B sales, there is likely a whole team of individuals involved. Some may be influencers, some decision makers, perhaps a budget committee is involved, and some are even saboteurs. These are called complex sales for obvious reasons.
Why do They Buy?
People spend money because they want something. Not because they need something. The usual suspects are that people want to solve a problem or alleviate a pain they're feeling. Or they want to gain something they don't have. Or they purchase to get some job done.1
Knowing why someone buys is crucial to crafting an offer that will resonate.
What is Your Offer?
Your offer is the message that must resonate with your audience to get them to respond. If you're selling a brand new offering to someone because it saves them money and their motivation is to please their boss and the boss is looking for a dependable solution that has stood the test of time, the offer of savings probably won't resonate.
To craft a good offer you need to know why they buy. But you also have to know the language they use to describe their reason to buy. My most lucrative company was one that sold an amenity to the multifamily industry. I knew nothing about my customers when I started so my initial brochure was about selling something that tenants in an apartment complex would enjoy. OOPS! Luckily a friendly consultant scribbled all over it at my first event. He corrected my language to be about something that residents in multifamily properties would enjoy. See the difference? If you're not in the industry it probably doesn't matter to you. But it did to my customers.
Matt Lerner calls this "language / market fit" and says your headline should fill in the blanks of statements like "I really wish I could _____ " or "Now I can _____"
Ultimately your offer should communicate the following:
Why they should buy.
Why they should buy from you.
Why they should buy now.
And that brings us to the third part of the marketing system input.
How the Offer is Communicated
Roff-Marsh calls this "the creative execution." This implies the right combination of words, images, colors, fonts, etc. To that I would add not just what the message looks and sounds like, but what channels it's delivered through. If your customers typically buy at trade shows, social media may not work. And vice versa. If they want the details they can read in a 10 page white paper, a short TikTok video is probably useless. And vice versa. Of course with a complex sale you might need different ways of communicating to different people in the buying process.
With the company I mentioned above selling to the multifamily industry, it took a long time to find the best channels for communicating our message. The two most effective ways we generated leads were postcard mailers and employees at one of our customers who moved to a new job at a different company. Unfortunately, there was only one of those we could control.
Can't You Just Hire Someone?
Yes, No, Maybe. If this seems like a lot of work, that's because it is. But the work comes in different parts. If you're going to hire a person, a consultant or an agency, make sure they're good at the parts of this process that you need. Here are the parts.
Figuring all this out. Learning who your ideal client is, why they buy, what language they use and what channels they pay attention to is the foundation to build your marketing system on. A lot of that work comes from structured interviews with customers and prospects. If you've never had a marketing system, I suggest you do a lot of those interviews yourself - or certainly attend them. This learning should not be outsourced (though you might hire someone to help with the structure of the interviews).
Designing the marketing system. When it comes to crafting that learning into a message that resonates and works in the right channels, an expert can be helpful. That's where experts with graphics, writing, SEO, advertising, etc. can be useful. Those are probably not skills you need in-house unless you do a lot of this kind of thing.
Implementing the system. That's the transformation stage I mentioned earlier in this post. It's probably the simplest and cheapest to hire for. Once the system is designed then others can be trained to put it into practice. That may mean cold calls or emails. It could be gathering leads at tradeshows. It could mean SEO, social media posts, or advertising. If you hire for that, hire someone with experience in the way you deliver your message.
Adapting the system to the inevitable changes. Nothing stays the same. Technology changes the channels. (When was the last time you bought something from a classified ad?) The reasons people buy evolve over time. Your system must continually be tested and adapted to those changes.
Each of those parts takes a different skill set. So I'll reiterate what I said above. If you're going to hire a person, a consultant, or an agency, make sure they're good at the parts of this process that you need.
What triggers your marketing? What do your inputs look like? Do you do the implementation yourself or hire others? Let us know in the comments.
I am by no means a marketing expert. What I can help with is understanding systems and structuring the customer interviews (part one of your marketing system). If you'd like to take advantage, I offer a free coaching session HERE.
For insight into other systems in your company check out my book, Output Thinking.
That last one (jobs to be done) is the least obvious - here are some examples. People buy video calls to connect with remote employees. People buy drills to make holes. People buy Hello Fresh or Blue Apron to make dinner more easily.