Explode Your Marketing the Easy Way

Click in, clamp on and crank up your marketing

What you are about to read is not about revolutionary or visionary ideas. It will not stop trains in their tracks or level skyscrapers.

But it has the potential to make your marketing so effective you will wonder why you didn’t do this before. If there is one message here it is that you need to leverage every opportunity to maximize outcome and minimize the amount of resources needed to make it happen.

Or as you will find out, why you stopped doing what you already knew and took so long to start doing it again. Maybe it could be an “ah-ha” moment. Who knows?

This process is simply a way of running a 2 second check list over your marketing to make sure you are getting the absolute most out of everything you do.

A lot of marketing ideas have a strong resemblance to an aircraft trying to take off.

There is a huge amount of work and organization at the beginning of an aircraft flight.  On top of all the fuelling, maintenance, scheduling, staffing and other issues, there is also the need to make sure that there are people on the aircraft with seats that have been paid for and baggage in the hold.

Having gone through all the planning and preparation, the aircraft finally moves to the end of the runway and awaits final clearance.  Even now, the whole project could be vetoed, stopped or delayed for any number of reasons.

Finally, the engines roar and the trust pushes the aircraft slowly down the runway.  It gains momentum until eventually it reaches that point where it leaves the ground and heads for the skies.

The nose points up and the engines sing in full voice, at full throttle, for some 30 minutes while it is heading up to its cruising height.  Then passengers will notice a change in not only the pitch of the engines but also the pitch of the plane as it levels out and starts its journey.

At the other end the plane needs to be landed to successfully complete the process and then the fairly simple effort of disembarking and getting luggage to passengers begins.

There are a lot of synergies between this and a marketing program.

There is a vast amount of effort in determining what the marketing program should be, the target market, the best delivery format, and a whole raft of different aspects that go together to make this the right marketing program to invest your scarce marketing resource into.

Now we need to invest the actual money to create the marketing program in reality and commit the rest of the resources needed to turn the theory into the practice.  From here we need to launch that marketing program and put a major amount of effort into it to get it to its cruising altitude. 

From this point on it will almost run itself, with fine tuning and a bit of careful overseeing, until you eventually land your clients and help them disembark again, hopefully leaving their hard earned cash in your cash register.

It is often the case that the majority of time, effort and investment occurs at the beginning of the project.  The aircraft will very commonly use more fuel getting off the ground than it will in the rest of its journey.

Why is it then that so few organizations never truly seem to get the most out of their marketing efforts?  They seem to be happy to spend all that money, time and effort, roll out the marketing idea once, and just take whatever comes through the door before putting it on the shelf to gather dust.

This just doesn’t seem to make sense.

I follow a very simple little program I call “click in, clamp on and crank up”.  It is a very simple 3-step process to help you have a look at your marketing and get you to do so much more with it than you might otherwise do.

Click In 

To "Click In" a new demographic group to an existing marketing idea is a surprisingly simple thing to do. 

Why not have a look at the target markets you want to approach and see which ones would also respond well to exactly the same marketing that you already have in place?  It is true that you may have to fine-tune one or two aspects but 95% of the marketing will be done and produced and ready to be rolled out with only minor changes. 

This simple action will quite literally almost half the cost of your marketing when split between 2 projects.  So why not do it with 3, or more?

Clamp On

To "Clamp On" you need to look at ways of rolling your marketing out more fully and allowing it to grow many more heads.

Having taken the initial marketing action, what else can you do to keep rolling that out?

A lot of marketing programs have multiple applications because clients will see something for the first time and then think about it without taking any action.  It takes the repetition to finally make the client act on their initial impulse as they become more comfortable with a buying scenario.

A lot of marketing simply rolls out an idea once and assumes that it will do the job.

Your first option is to repeat the piece of marketing multiple times.  Such examples can be seen on television all the time when you have the same advertisement repeated over a period of time.  This also takes advantage of people’s changing circumstances by being in the right place at the right time and adds to recall.

It’s interesting to see more and more television advertisements have a full advertisement followed very quickly by a small mini recap just to reinforce the original message.

But nothing says you have to repeat the same piece of marketing.  A second option is to consider what other ideas could be added to that piece of marketing that would make it grow many heads and move in different directions and give people different options.

There is nothing wrong with a piece of marketing that gives the consumer more than one option. As long as you do not add so many options as to be confusing you are likely to increase sales.

Ensure that there is a logical link connecting the different marketing options that makes sense to the customer and is simple to follow to maximise success.  This in turn might link on to several others things until finally the potential buyer has all the information they need to make a one or more purchasing decision.

This might involve any number of different marketing ideas and delivery systems.  You might have an initial survey that leads to a chosen e-book that leads to a telephone follow-up or maybe leads to a one-on-one presentation.  This all joins together to produce a complete marketing plan.

What I see a lot is a reactive aspect to marketing where people create the marketing action and then leaves an option to a potential buyer that basically says, “if you’re at all interested, please come back to us”.  I’d have to suggest that you’d be far more successful in your marketing if you have something more proactive that follows that client up and asks the question of them. A “hook”.

Crank Up

The final aspect, "Crank Up" is simply the recognition that you can roll out a piece of marketing at some different time period.  A marketing action that worked last year may well work again this year, especially if it is seasonally based.  Good ideas that work once will often work again with very minor adjustment or change.

Does all this sound a bit too simple? Like you know all this already?

It probably does and you probably do – but does that mean you are doing it? It usually only takes the realization of how easy it is to do all these things, and the brain to start working in these directions, and ideas start to flow.

Embrace them and give them the room to grow – it is satisfying and very profitable.

Let’s look at a fairly simple example that demonstrates all these aspects working together.  You’ll see that we have divided the page so that we can make a note of when the different components of the marketing idea are actually actioned.

A butcher’s shop once came up with the idea that it would be very good for their marketing to do a sausage sizzle for a local school.  The plan was a simple one – they would do the sausage sizzle dressed as butchers and donate all the money, less the cost of meat, to the school.

Let’s see what happened when these 3 principles where applied to this marketing idea. 

As you can see from this example, the potential to take an ordinary one-off sausage and steak sizzle up to a significant marketing plan exists.  The butcher has significantly increased turnover in the shop, profile in the marketplace and is well known for its innovative ideas and quality of meat.

If you look through that example you will see that the cost of setting up and running this programme is actually quite minor. 

Here is a point worthy of note. One of the keys is that, once it was set up and running, money was only invested into the marketing plan when money was spent at the shop – they made the money before they spent the money.  This is by no means always the case with things such as advertising.

So look at your marketing ideas and see where you can “click in, clamp on or crank up” an old or original idea and turn it into something that will make a lot more money. 

Remember, once you’re flying at altitude, there is very little cost.

Bill is a very approachable person, so feel free to make contact with questions or to clarify any aspect of the ideas above.

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