Your marketing is more than just having great ads and sales copy. No matter how great your ads are, there are other factors that come into play to determine how successful your business will be. Your marketing system needs to cover all of them.
It’s been said that there are generally three things that determine how successful your marketing campaign will be. In order of importance, they are:
- Your market
- Your offer
- Your sales copy or ads
Notice that your ads are the least important of the three?
It makes sense when you think about it. You could have the greatest ad for an expensive set of golf clubs in the world. But if you show that ad to a group of literature buffs, it ain’t gonna cut the mustard.
If, however, you have a weak ad and you target a hot market who wants what you’re selling, you’ll do much better than a great ad targeting a weak market.
Likewise, your offer has to be good. I would say even great—a “no-brainer.” If your golf clubs ad is great and you target your ad to die-hard golfers who know, trust, and purchase your clubs, you’re not going to make many sales if they can get the same set of clubs at their local golf store for less. Unless there’s a compelling reason to buy them from you instead.
So even though you’ve got a good ad targeted to the right market, if your offer is weak it doesn’t matter that you hired the best copywriter in the world to write your ad: it’s still not gonna sell.
Only when all three work together—your market, your offer, and your copy—do you make the maximum sales possible.
I would even add two more success factors to the other three, the first being media costs.
You already know what your product costs you. And you know your gross profit margin, based on the cost in which you sell that product. For example, if you have a 75% margin on a $100 product, your product would cost you $25 to produce or obtain, and your gross profit will be $75 per item sold.
In addition to the cost of the product, you also have fixed costs, but these too are known in advance. So the unknown variable is really the cost of your media.
If you buy a full-page ad in a national magazine and it costs you $18,000, and you earn a gross profit of $15,000, you are short the $3,000 necessary to cover the cost of the ad and break even. So the ad is considered a failure as a result. But if you’re able to obtain that same full-page ad for $10,000, then you make a profit of $5,000, and the ad turns into a success.
In this example, the difference between success and failure is how cheaply you can buy your media.
Note that I’m assuming you’re running your best copy—your control ad. Improving the response rate of the ad can also make the difference between success and failure, but all things being equal, you can see the direct result of your media costs on your campaign.
Now perhaps your full-page ad in that particular magazine may not bring a positive ROI if you can’t get the space cheap enough, but it may in another magazine or another media.
For example, direct mail has no media costs—just printing, postage, and list rental, if applicable. The same can be said of catalogs. Those costs are fixed, especially if you are mailing to your own “house” list.
However…print display ads, TV, radio, and any other negotiable medium introduces variable costs that could impact the success or failure of your marketing campaign.
I’ll share with you some great ways to save quite a bit of money in media costs in a later section.
The other success factor I’d add to the “standard three” is timing. Timing is arguably part of the offer/market match, but results can swing in a huge arc between more successful and less successful, even though they may still be within the range to be considered an overall success. In fact, the best market/offer match-up is often “tuned” to the timing of the ad being run. That is, what will the market bear? Often it should be the other way around: the ad should be mailed/run/aired when the timing is at its most opportune moment to generate the highest profits and ROI.
The timing factor is especially evident when tying in promotions to certain current events in the news. Often the news hits with little warning, and you have to act fast to develop and deploy the promotion while the news is still fresh. Obviously events that stay in the news for longer periods give you more time to plan, but it’s still better to be first.
Even better is when you know news is coming, and you plan for all outcomes in advance. There’s a reason sportswear and other companies have promotions ready to go for both teams in the Superbowl or World Series. One of the two teams will win. How else could they start their campaigns the minute the official results are known?
The same could be said for elections. How about the release of a movie or music CD? An upcoming holiday. A NASA mission. The passing of a new law. The Olympics. Any time you have an opportunity to use the news for your benefit, you should strongly consider it. This is especially important when you send a broadcast email to your list. Why should they open yours in a sea of others?
You should know that the 2 most important factors (in order of importance) that the people on your list consider when deciding whether to read your email are:
- Who the email is from. Changing your “From” name often or from what they’re used to seeing can hurt your open rate.
- Your subject. And if they DO open your email and feel “suckered” because your subject has nothing to do with the content, they will likely delete it instantly, taking no further action. More on that in a bit…
And those 2 factors will determine whether they:
- Open your email
- Delete your email without opening it
- Not delete it, but save it for later
Obviously we want them to take the first action: to open your email immediately, where your copy takes over and convinces them to take the desired action.
But back to “entering the conversation already in their minds.” Whenever there is an event they are already talking about, you should use that to your advantage. And if that event can result in different outcomes, planning for all possible outcomes is just one way you can be among the first.
And speaking of being the first, there’s another aspect of timing that we’re going to cover in the sections ahead. “Conventional” wisdom tells us that if there are a lot of products similar to yours being sold to your target market, there is usually a demand for your product as well.
Well there’s also an opportunity to dominate your niche market by introducing a product that is harmonious with their desires and needs, and where you are the first to market such a product to them. However, like any other marketing strategy, there is a risk-to-reward ratio involved. By being the first, you are taking more risk, but you will also reap more reward if successful. But the reverse is also true: you run a greater risk of losing more if it’s a failure.
The way we limit this risk is by testing, which allows us to determine whether to move forward, or “roll out,” with our promotion or cut our losses short. So as you can imagine, testing is performed on a much smaller scale on a sample representative of our larger market. We’ll cover testing in greater detail later on.
But…getting back to your market, your offer, and your copy. The three together will generally determine the success of your marketing campaigns. That’s why great ads alone won’t grow your business. You need to factor in the other things that will make or break your success. A good marketing system should incorporate all of this as well—consistently—from end-to-end.
One of the greatest systems ever developed in the fast food industry was Ray Kroc’s vision of consistency, based on a proven formula that was to be applied to all McDonald’s restaurants.
McDonald’s didn’t start out as an empire. It was Ray’s system, based on the fact that McDonald’s restaurants in California had the same menu prepared in the same way as the McDonald’s in New York, that enabled their tremendous growth.
Ray developed a system that he tested and tweaked, until it was a model of success: his “seed” system. Then he multiplied that system in a huge way, rolling it out on a grand scale and taking the rewards that came with it.
The beauty of this concept is anyone can do it, whether on a large or much smaller scale, and get the same results as the “seed” system.
I hope I’ve convinced you about the merits of putting a system in place for your marketing. More than likely you already have some kind of general system or plan working for you, even if it’s not complete or consistent. You may know what needs to be done, but maybe you’re not sure how to go about it. Or maybe you’re just shifting your focus week-to-week, month-to-month, chasing down the methods that you think will give you the greatest success at that time.
But opportunities are slipping through the crevices you’re not watching. That car you’re pushing just isn’t moving forward fast enough.
Let’s face it: you’ve been down that road before. Isn’t it time to focus your efforts on what’s really important to you and your business?
I’m here to help you do just that.
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