Eliminating Hit-or-Miss Marketing Should Be Your Top Priority

When the world gets confusing and complicated people tend to respond in more unpredictable ways. They are more reactive than proactive. They are less thoughtful. They act before they think because there is less data and fewer proven practices to guide their direction.

The issue is that when the world gets confusing and complicated you should do the opposite of what most people do. You should lean into thoughtfulness, strategy, systems and predictability.

Today, we see many companies carrying out what we call hit-or-miss marketing moves. They’re trying a collection of random marketing tactics and seeing what sticks.

This is NOT going to get you to your goals. It’s not going to help you grow your business. It’s not going to help you generate more leads. It’s not going to help you get your sales reps more sales opportunities.

Here’s how you eliminate hit-or-miss marketing from your company.

Get Educated

While the world is way more complicated, your access to information has never been greater. Hundreds of resources are available to help you gain clarity around how to generate more consistent revenue growth.

But there are also a lot of “get rich quick” scams associated with marketing too. Examples include Facebook ads that promise to 10x your revenue, paid search or backlink services that will triple your lead flow and LinkedIn programs that guarantee to generate more leads than you’ll know what to do with.

There are no easy buttons. You have real challenges that need real solutions. If you have cancer, you’d look for the best cancer doctor or the best resource for information related to your specific type of cancer. If you need legal advice, you’d turn to your most trusted advisors and ask for a referral.

Take the same approach here. Neither of these experts (medical or legal) would promise you anything, nor would they be cheap, but you would trust them because they are experts in their field. What you would get is their expert advice, their years of experience, their skills in helping you with your specific situation or condition and their guidance as you work on dealing with your challenges. 

Square 2 publishes a weekly e-newsletter called No More Hit-or-Miss Marketing Moves. Each week you’ll get tips, techniques, tools, interviews, resources, advice and guidance on how to take a more strategic, systematic, data-driven and results-oriented approach to growing your business with marketing, sales and customer advocacy tactics. It’s the go-to resource for people who want to stop doing marketing randomly and start doing it with intention and direction.

Use a System

Interestingly enough, businesses are run on systems. You have a system for paying bills and collecting money as well as for hiring and onboarding new team members. You have systems for manufacturing, purchasing and delivering your services. But most companies don’t have a system for generating revenue.

If you want to grow and do so strategically, efficiently and in a way that is scalable, then you need a revenue generation system.

Your new revenue generation system needs to focus on process, strategy, tactics, campaigns, technology and the resources required to install, operate and measure the performance of this new revenue generation system.

The revenue generation system needs to help install a regular rhythm to setting goals, defining rocks, setting to-dos for team members and working weekly to measure performance, track progress and identify issues.

This combination of tools, techniques, frameworks and rhythmic meeting cadences come together in the system Square 2 uses when it works with clients. This system is called RGS™, the Revenue Generation System.

To learn even more about what this system looks like, how it works and why it helps companies grow, visit this resource on everything RGS.

Lean Into Strategy

Nothing fixes hit-or-miss marketing tactics like a solid well-thought-out and well-designed strategy. We talk about strategy before tactics a lot at Square 2, and this is another place where having a strategy eliminates any hit-or-miss marketing for good.

The strategy does have different meanings for different people. In the case of revenue, it’s fairly detailed and includes the following elements.

Your personas need to be defined in detail. Think about your best customer and then create a profile for that person and their company.

Keep in mind you might need multiple profiles for different people at the same company or you might need multiple profiles for people at multiple types of companies if you have more than one perfect customer. Also, make sure these are detailed enough to include psychographics and online behavior profile information.

You’ll need to know exactly the pains, challenges and issues your perfect customer persona is dealing with.

You’ll need to know exactly how your products or services solve those pains.

You’ll then need to look at your products or services and identify what makes them remarkable – not good but remarkable.

Now the magic happens. You’ll need to take the personas, pains, solutions and remarkables and turn that into your Big Story. That’s the emotional, engaging and differentiated story that grabs your perfect customer’s attention and gets them to want to learn more.

Now you take that and plan to roll it out through the correct selection of marketing tactics organized and orchestrated into campaigns that will create an inflow of leads. You continue that educational effort by designing a sales process that takes any potential sales opportunities and flows them through a process that produces a high close rate.

This effort involves using a buyer journey model, like our Cyclonic Buyer Journey™, to map out every touch point from your website all the way through your paperwork at the end of the sales process.

Your strategic work also involves doing some math. You’ll want to calculate exactly how many leads and sales opportunities you need based on your close rate to get you to your revenue goals. Then you’ll need to make sure you have the right level of investment to fund all the activities required to generate that number of leads.

This strategy work is intense and takes time. It requires certain tools, experiences and techniques. But it’s mandatory if you want to take a more strategic approach to growth.

Build Out a Plan

With your strategy locked down, now you can move into planning. You’ll be shocked at how quickly planning can go once you have your personas, Big Story, remarkables, budget and expectations around results.

Building your plan has everything to do with knowing what tactics you want to use and how you want to execute your campaigns.

The best way to build out your plan is to start working through tactics in a prioritized order and do your best to associate a certain amount of activity with each tactic.

For example, if you think you need organic search engine optimization to be a key tactic, work on how many visitors and how many leads you expect from your effort in this area. Do the same with all the tactics – email, paid search, paid social, content marketing, your own website optimization, video on YouTube, podcasting, etc. Each tactic has to contribute to your lead gen goals.

When you’re done and you have all the tactics and the expected outcomes documented, go back and organize the tactics along with the messaging into highly orchestrated omnichannel campaigns.

Don’t forget to connect the campaigns to your sales efforts and sales process. This means making sure sales reps are aware of all the marketing outreach and are supporting it and responding to it as needed. 

Make Decisions Based on Data

There is still one more mandatory adjustment you’ll have to make to completely eliminate hit-or-miss marketing from your revenue generation efforts, and that involves moving from opinion-based to data-driven decision-making when evaluating both marketing and sales execution.

Instead of running your marketing based on assumptions, opinions or guesswork, you should be making decisions based on data, insights and the actual performance of your marketing and sales execution.

One way to ensure this gets done is to make sure all your revenue-related execution is built on top of a data platform like HubSpot.  

Marketing is data-driven because you now have access to website visitor data, email response data, landing page performance data, offer performance data, blog performance data, visitor source data, specific campaign data and more. All your marketing decisions are based on your performance data.

Sales is data-driven because you now have access to data on the performance of marketing-qualified leads, sales-qualified leads, sales opportunities and closed customers. You know exactly how long it takes to close new business. You know your conversion rates at each stage of the sales process. You know your close rate, pipeline value and pipeline velocity, and you have insight into exactly how your sales execution is firing at all times.

On the customer side, you know how much revenue is coming from new business versus current customers. You have pipelines set up for both new and existing customer revenue opportunities. You have data on retention and advocacy across your customer base.

You have a full 360-degree view of revenue at your business. All your decisions are made based on data. You are on your way to a full digital transformation and a revenue generation system that produces month-over-month revenue growth based on your execution.

Work With Experts

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that there is a very good reason most companies don’t operate as described above. It’s hard to make all these changes. It’s even harder to get your organization to come along for the journey. It’s hard to set up the processes, install the technology and start practicing new motions for sales, marketing and customer service.

Honestly, that’s why most companies just keep doing what they’ve always done.

But you don’t have to do this alone, and you don’t have to work with us. You can hire people who can do this. You can work with software companies like HubSpot that will also help you get set up. You can get a consultant who helps you get set up, trains you and then leaves you to it. All of these are viable options.

Of course, you can also work with an agency like Square 2 that specializes in getting all aspects of a revenue generation system set up. Many of our clients pick up the system and run it on their own, while others have us stick around to help in a few key strategic areas.

Our interest is in helping you grow. Our passion is helping you learn what a revenue generation system is and how it can help your company grow. Our mission is to teach people how to do what we do so that they can do it on their own.

Using experts, in whatever way works for you, helps you fast-track your efforts. It helps you get where you’re trying to go faster. It’s like working with a personal trainer, golf instructor or financial planner. You are going to learn more, get better faster and reach your goals sooner than if you try to do it on your own.