The Balanced Marketer - the Zen of Customer Acquisition

BALANCE THE MESSAGE:
We have doubtless all heard the expression “garbage in, garbage out”; it’s a computing maxim that roughly means that answers, even from the very best computers, are only as good as the data fed into them. Any machine that relies on data storage, processing or retrieval will produce incorrect answers when fed faulty data. This principle is well known and applies to much more than computers. Many people never really apply it to marketing. To some degree, applying this principle to marketing makes more sense if you reverse the order: “garbage out, garbage in”. In other words, if your marketing communications are “garbage”, what will that communication obtain for you in terms of results?

How does one define a “garbage” communication? Here are a few critieria I use:

• Junk: Sent to the wrong public. Don’t get me wrong, bad promotion IS better than no promotion, but not by much. The simplest definition for “junk mail” is communication sent to people who don’t want it or have a potential use for it. Sending general public bulk mail to every house in a ten-mile radius is OK if you are selling something everyone with a house might need. However, if you make printed circuit boards in custom configurations for cellular telephone manufacturers, sending promotion for your product to residential addresses is a waste of time and money. (This is an extreme example, but you get the idea). This applies to both postal mail and email.
• Unprofessional presentation: Letters, press releases and other types of general promo that are poorly written, amateurishly composed, printed badly (or obviously very cheaply), contain typos, spelling or grammar errors or badly reproduced photos or illustrations will not be well received. Make sure that the quality of your marketing communications reflects the general tone and quality of your products and your company. Literature OF ANY KIND that looks like it was done “on the cheap” rarely makes the kind of impact you would like it to and very often creates the exact opposite of the effect that was intended.

BALANCE THE MEDIA:
There is another maxim you may be familiar with: “outflow equals inflow”. It only follows that no one will buy anything from you if they don’t know you’re there. That’s why marketing communications are essential to the survival of any business —communications put out to the environment and public people responding to those communications and reaching back in to your business are the inhale and exhale that keeps your company alive. That’s why we do marketing in the first place but there is a larger dynamic to outflow and inflow that many people don’t really understand. You don’t always get it back on the same channels you put it out on.

It really is true, but can be a little hard to wrap your head around. The scenario sometimes happens this way: a company mails out ten thousand promotional pieces. Management kicks a little about the expense but eagerly waits for the orders to come rolling in. They start sourcing their leads, to be able to see how many new customers are responding to their big mailings. Only ten new customers tell the receptionist they are responding to the promotion they got in the mail. Oddly, three weeks later, an old customer they haven’t heard from in years calls in with a huge order out of the blue. He didn’t get the promotional piece, he just happened to have a big order he needed filled and thought of the company because of the great way he was treated last time. Management happily accepts the order and pronounces the direct mail campaign a failure. They stop mailing. Six weeks later they are in a financial slump again and wonder what to do.The answer? Keep mailing!They do another bulk mailing and lo, within a few weeks another big order wanders in the door.

What happened? You don’t always get it back on the same channels you put it out on. Yes, there is something almost mystical about this situation and if you are from a strictly materialistic school of thought you are likely to consider me a bit of a loon, but I have seen this work too many times to disbelieve it. The Natural Balance of Things is disturbed when you do something massive and create a large flow of energy (communication) in one direction.

Nature Abhors a Vacuum

The action of pushing communication away from you creates space to be filled in your area and you are likely to inadvertently pull all kinds of things toward you when you do so. This is somewhat metaphysical and can be hard to track, but if you graph your marketing impressions (number of people reached with a marketing communication) in a given week, then graph the gross revenue of your business week to week, I guarantee you that as you put forth the effort to get more marketing impressions done each week, you will see, after a three to six week lag, a commensurate rise in your gross revenue. If you don’t know how to graph your marketing impressions as a statistic, call me and we can discuss it. If you don’t know how to graph your gross revenue, call your bookkeeper or accountant...quick!

The Bottom Line:

Marketing is all about BALANCE. Create an imbalance and something will rush in to fill it. Balance your message and your media and your marketing can’t miss.