Ben and I were speaking on the phone the other day. We were having an interesting conversation about the difference between people that get marketing and those that don’t.
I’ll back up a little – what has brought this conversation on is we’ve done a few newsletter suitability audits for business owners who “just didn’t get it.” This has always led to the person doing the suitability audit to shrug and say “some get it, some don’t.” Which is a little lazy, considering we just spent all this time, energy and effort to do the audit in the first place.
This time, for whatever reason we were a little more philosophical about the whole situation.
After much rumination it turns out there two key factors that people who ‘get it’ have that people that ‘don’t get it,’ don’t have. The two are:
Be Willing And Able To Track Results
The bottom line is unless you can attribute your results to specific marketing activities then every time you are asked to spend money you are going to be sceptical. I hate wasting money and I’m sure you do too. It drives me nuts to think that I have to spend money and not know what I am getting for it.
First and foremost, you need to be able to track results in order to ‘get it.’ It emotionally becomes much easier because you’ll quickly know if you’ve made a wise investment or else you’ve got a dud on your hands – then you have two choices: fix the dud or else stop spending the money.
The inability or unwillingness of the business owners to track results has led to advertising being sold the way it is these days. It also has led to many business owners being ‘irrationally cheap’ – expecting too much from too little.
The Ability To Use ‘Risk’ Wisely.
Due to the incessant babble of Stock Market and Finance experts the entire western world is conditioned to think that you need to take huge risks in order to reap huge rewards. This is not necessarily the case. The world is full of low-risk, high-reward situations.
For a couple thousand dollars I can get a half page ad in an industry magazine – I know that I only need one customer coming from this ad to say “yes” in order to cover the costs – that is a fairly low risk idea. I also understand that it could take more than a single insertion to get the average of one yes a month – it might take 3. And three ‘yes’s’ come in the third month.
There is a chance that it will fall flat on its face but by the same token there is a chance that it will work quite well too. A risk worth taking – the rewards of success are high relative to the risk of ‘failure.’
Marketing is psychology and maths. Great maths can overcome poor psychology, but great psychology can’t overcome poor maths. First and foremost you need to know your marketing maths. That’s what it really means to get it. Get it?