Top 3 Places to Look for Leaks in Your Marketing

The business owner’s usual reaction to an economic meltdown is to start slashing expenses, and marketing is often among the hardest hit. But before you chop valuable marketing programs, let’s make sure your program isn’t leaking dollars or losing prospects (tomorrow’s dollars).

Find the leaks and you just might save plenty of money to keep your marketing going.

In a poor economy, it’s especially important to maintain your visibility and continue the lead acquisition and development programs. These are what ensure that you hold onto your market share (if you’re a defensive thinker) or even gain market share (if you’re more of an offensive thinker).

Here are the top three places to look.

1. Legacy marketing programs.

If you’ve been marketing for any length of time it’s likely you’re using one or more tactics either because you “always have” or because “everybody else is”. Trade shows and display advertising are great examples of this.

These justifications for a marketing program just don’t make sense in a bad economy.

Line up all your marketing programs (figuratively of course) and ask yourself why you are spending money on each program and what you are getting out of it. If it doesn’t directly contribute to sales opportunities, stop doing it.

That’s one leak fixed and some money saved.

2. Your website.

Websites are the new marketing hub. In weak economies and strong ones, it’s where most of your prospects first make contact with you – even if you don’t know they’re doing it. Nearly everyone passes through your site at one time or another.

The questions we’re going to ask about the website are:

a)    How many visitors leave immediately?
b)    Do you know who stays and looks around the site?

To answer the first question, look at your “bounce rate”. This is the percentage of visitors who leave your site within a few seconds of landing on it and without going anywhere else on the site. If you’ve never looked at your bounce rate, you may be very surprised to learn how high it is.

If it’s less than 40%, we won’t worry about it at this point. If it’s greater than that, we know you can increase the number of quality visitors who pass through the entry point to look around the site. You’ll end up with more visitors on the site without increasing what you spend on getting them there.

More on fixing your bounce rate in a future article.

The second website question – do you know who stays and looks around – depends on how effective your efforts are to get them to identify themselves. Why do you care? Because the people who are looking around your site today are quite likely to be the people who will be buying your type of product or service in the future. They just don’t know it yet.

It’s important to capture their contact information so you can establish an ongoing relationship with them. Get more names today; nurture them well over time; and you’ll have more hot leads in the future.

That’s two leaks fixed and an increase in quality leads.

3. The forgotten prospects.

Most marketing programs work like this: generate leads → toss them to the sales team. If only it were that simple.

For any lead generation program you run, only 20% or so of the respondents will be interested in talking with a sales person. And that’s if you’re lucky. The other 80%+ want to learn more before they commit to a sales call.

If yours is a typical marketing program and you’re tossing leads directly to the sales team without qualifying their interest and without a program to nurture the ones who need it, you just hit the jackpot. You’re sitting on a bunch of perfectly good prospects that you can turn into leads.

This topic is too big for this article, but I’ve written about it extensively on Tatum Marketing. Designing a Lead Nurturing System – Part One is a good place to start.

After that

There are plenty of other places where marketing programs leak. I’d also look at the following:

• The hand-off of leads from marketing to sales. (Read In B2B Marketing, the Hand-off to the Sales Team May Be Your Weakest Link.)
• Any program that isn’t being test and measured.
• Any program that can’t be measured. (Just cancel these right now).

I’m sure there are others. Where do you find leaks? Share your insight with us here.