What Is Hit-or-Miss Marketing?

What we call hit-or-miss marketing is when companies try different marketing tactics hoping that something works. It’s extremely common these days as the challenges associated with getting in front of prospects have increased.

Today, privacy and data regulations make it more difficult to send cold emails. People are still working at home, so calling into the office is problematic. While events have returned, they are not producing attendees at pre-pandemic levels.  

It’s harder than ever to generate leads, deliver sales opportunities and grow revenue month over month, so company leaders keep trying hit-or-miss marketing moves without any understanding of what level of marketing is required to generate enough leads to ensure they hit their goals.

However, you don’t have to do this type of marketing. In fact, we help hundreds of companies every year transition from hit-or-miss marketing to a system of revenue generation that includes marketing, sales and customer service.

Let’s help you move from hit-or-miss marketing to the right way to grow your business.

How To Know for Sure if You’re Doing Hit-or-Miss Marketing

It’s obvious to some people that they’ve been doing hit-or-miss marketing. Once we start talking about it, they say, “Wow, that sounds like us.” But for some others, it might not be so obvious.

There are some clear indicators that you might be doing hit-or-miss marketing without even knowing it.

You Don’t Know Exactly Who You’re Trying To Attract – This means you don’t have a detailed profile on paper of the specific person or people at specific types of companies. You also need psychographic data and a digital behavioral profile of where they get their educational information online.

You Don’t Have a Big Story – This means you’re missing an emotional, disruptive, compelling and engaging story about your business that is designed specifically to attract the people you’ve profiled and everyone can clearly articulate it when necessary.

You Don’t Know What Makes Your Company Remarkable – This means you’re not sure if everyone in the company can clearly articulate what you do that NO OTHER COMPETITOR in your space does or can say they do.

You Don’t Have Specific Marketing Goals and a Correlated Investment – This means you don’t have an agreed set of metrics you need to hit and don’t have an agreement on how much time and money is needed to get you to your goals.

You Haven’t Prioritized the Right Set of Marketing Tactics Into Orchestrated Campaigns – This means don’t have a prioritized and aligned set of marketing tactics, and they’re not orchestrated into an omnichannel, highly personalized campaign that carries your Big Story out to your targeted prospects.

You’re Not Analyzing and Optimizing Your Efforts – This means you don’t have the data, the process or the people to review performance metrics and make decisions based on the insights in that data so that you can improve performance month over month.

If any of these sound like your company, not to worry, this can be fixed. Here’s some of the guidance we provide clients when we start working to fix their hit-or-miss marketing execution.

Your Need a Process Around How You Plan Your Revenue Activities –  When you add process to your revenue generation efforts, you install a repeatable, predictable and scalable framework and meeting rhythm that gets everyone working on the most important initiatives, prioritizing execution, reporting regular progress, resolving issues and tracking key performance metrics. 

You Need a Well-Thought-Out, Well-Designed Go-to-Market Strategy – Like getting the blueprints done before you start construction on your new home, you need a revenue generation strategy before you do anything related to revenue generation. This includes identifying and prioritizing your target personas, defining your Big Story, making sure your company is truly remarkable, mapping your prospects’ buyer journeys, aligning investment/budget with expected results and creating a scorecard to track progress.

You Need To Select and Prioritize the Right Tactics – With so many tactics at your disposal, most companies can’t and shouldn’t do them all. This part of the system helps you select the right tactics, prioritize those tactics and ensure the selected tactics are enough to get you to your goals.

You Need To Organize Those Tactics Into Campaigns – Once the tactics are selected, now you need to organize and orchestrate all those tactics into highly personalized, omnichannel campaigns that get your story and message in front of the people you want to attract to your business.

You Need the Technology Platform To Automate and Analyze Your Execution – With so many tactics and so many campaign options, nobody can handle everything that needs to be done on their own. Technology, like HubSpot, is a critical part of a revenue generation system so that you can automate as many aspects of your execution as possible and then analyze the performance of your efforts to uncover insights, inform ongoing optimization and help you create smarter, more data-driven action plans.

You Need To Make Sure You Have the Right Resources – Finally, no revenue generation system can be executed without the right people with the right skills and resources. A system helps you align your plans with your internal team, your external contractors or an outside agency. Once all the work required is covered, your system will be complete.

If revenue generation and business growth are important to you, then eliminating hit-or-miss marketing and replacing it with a more systematic approach to growing your company should be your top priority. Now you have the insight you need to change the way you execute marketing, sales and customer service to grow your business fast.