This year the business has gone really well: I have more demand than I can handle, and those are good signs for any business. Right now I'm in a growth crisis —serving more people, hiring and training qualified staff, delivering projects already in motion and still supporting my long-time clients. It's chaos! But I'll take this chaos over the other crisis: the one where no one buys your product or service.
Recently, as a reward to myself, I spent a week with my family in one of the 10 most beautiful places in the United States, over 6,200 feet up (almost 2 km above sea level). A place that captivated me with its beauty, its calm and its offerings for every kind of person.
As a lover of history and of the why of things, I visited the town museum and fell for a slot machine that had been running since the city's earliest days. I tried to win a few times, even just once, but luck never came. The funny part: the description said the townsfolk called it "the bandit," precisely because it took your money. 😂
I want to use that story to illustrate what I call slot-machine marketing —and it's more common than you'd think. I've fallen into this devastating technique myself.
Why do I care so much about marketing?
Simple: because that's where the profits are. If people don't know your business, if no one refers you, if you're a complete unknown, you'll die financially. That's why marketing is one of the key pieces of any business.
A while back I studied the marketing plans of many entrepreneurs. My frustration was realizing that almost all of it was advertising and nothing more. And worse, boring, monotonous advertising with nothing to set them apart from the crowd. Here's the summary of 99% of what I saw:
After that, you wait for a customer to accidentally —with an immediate need— stumble onto your ad, see it and decide to hire you at that exact moment. It's torture: praying to the sky that some random person, in a random place, with a random need, gets convinced and buys. "Who knows? Maybe one day a big sale closes and it'll all be worth it…"
It's just like taking your business to a slot machine to find customers: you drop in a coin, pull the lever and hope luck rewards you. Every so often, after losing hundreds (or thousands) of dollars, you win something —just enough to get excited, raise your hopes and keep playing the bandit. Without noticing, you get poorer and the casino gets richer.
Stop the slot-machine marketing and start doing marketing with purpose.
Why, instead of giving your money away to that machine, not go to a vending machine, where you know exactly what you'll get for your capital? To take the first step, there are two key questions:
- What goal am I after?
- What am I going to focus on?
In this post I focus on the first one.
What goal am I after?
A while back we helped a married couple set up a commercial building cleaning company. Soon after, I saw them advertising every kind of service to every kind of customer: for retirees, for newly finished construction, for medical offices, for deep move-out cleanings in condos… Everything for everyone. When I asked what they wanted from that spend, the answer was:
- Raise brand awareness.
- Get prospects to request a quote.
- Increase sales.
- Grow the number of leads.
And all of that with a single ad! That's the problem: you can't kill every animal in the jungle with one bullet. When you have a small business you want to economize every dollar and squeeze the most out of it —and that's exactly why you have to aim much better. You have to become a sniper (because every bullet costs) and stop being a Wild West gunslinger firing into the air.
It's impossible for a single ad to take you from complete unknown to being known, capture leads, generate prospects and close a sale —all in one shot. It simply can't be done.
One goal, one shot
If your focus is attracting prospects, don't try to close a sale there: don't waste that bullet. If you're capturing leads, don't write to people who are already your customers —those you re-engage, not capture. The biggest subscriber growth I've gotten, on social media and on this blog, came from posts that offered something useful to a specific niche I had identified. That's the secret.
Being just another company shouting offers into the jungle, competing against others that offer the same thing with the same virtues, is frustrating and exhausting. Why keep down that bad road, instead of becoming something different and useful that addresses the pain of a specific group? Use your bullets on clear targets, not on trying to sell to everyone.
In the next post I get into point 2: what am I going to focus on?
Marketing with purpose starts by knowing who you're talking to and what you want to achieve. At DISSAU we help business owners ditch the "slot machine" and build a strategy that actually converts. Talk to us.
