Marketing isn’t just about creating customers

Marketing can be hard to measure. And that can make it a very frustrating experience, especially if you’re not a marketing professional. Every day, we hear business owners and entrepreneurs say things like:

• “How do I know if my marketing is working?”

• “I wasn’t seeing return on my investment, so I stopped.”

• “I stick with internet and social media marketing because I can’t measure the effectiveness of the other marketing methods.”

• “I ran the ad and didn’t get a single new customer from it. Waste of money.”

In our experience, non-marketers (and even marketing pros, if they’re not careful) run into problems because of at least one of these four failures:

• Failure to understand what the objective is

• Failure to match the marketing tactics to the objective

• Failure to gather and use the right metrics for the objective

• Failure to match the campaign’s length to the objective

In this article, we’ll address the first failure. We’ll cover the rest in Part 2.

You need to understand what the objective is.

The number one problem we see is people misunderstanding the objective of their marketing.

What’s the one thing you want your advertising to do? Bring you customers, of course. (Or clients, patients, etc.)

But how does someone become your customer? Most people are very literal when they answer this question. “By buying from me, obviously.”

Yes, winning the purchase is one of the objectives you can choose from. But it’s not the only.

It can’t be the only because there are a lot of things that happen outside the purchase… but they all affect the purchase. Consider the following scenario:

• I’m on Yelp or Google looking for a contractor to help me with a home remodel. I see both sponsored and unsponsored search results.

• Among the names I see, they’re all unrecognizable except for one. Let’s call it “Ants & Aphids Design Build (AADB).”

• Maybe I recognize AADB from an ad I saw in the grocery store, a YouTube video posted by an interior design influencer I follow, a home improvement magazine, my local paper or the baseball field where my kid’s Little League team plays. Maybe I don’t even remember where I saw the name AADB.

• It doesn’t really matter. The point is, I recognize AADB, and I don’t recognize the rest, so it’s the one I click on first.

Am I likely to pick a remodeler based solely on a grocery store ad? No, unless it was seeing the inside of my local Albertsons that made me decide it’s finally time to install new kitchen cabinets and I want to call a contractor right away.

If I’m searching for a remodeler, am I more likely to see the Yelp/Google ad than the grocery store ad? Yes, unless Ralphs starts stocking remodelers’ business cards next to its produce.

But which remodeler am I more likely to purchase from, AADB or the unrecognizable rest?

This is why marketers think about the entire customer journey:

Marketing isn’t just about creating customers. It’s about creating people who are aware of your brand, considerers, new customers, repeat customers and advocates.

Think about some well-known or common examples:

• “Nationwide is on your side” tells you literally nothing about what Nationwide does. But it makes you feel good about the brand. That campaign is more about the “awareness” part of the journey.

• “Limited time only” discount and BOGO campaigns are meant to create a sense of urgency so that you buy right away. They’re also usually associated with close-ups of juicy burgers or sizzling shrimp that get your stomach growling. Those campaigns are all about the decision.

• Referral bonuses for people who get their friends and family to sign up as customers are focused on advocacy.

The customer journey isn’t restricted to customers. Your objectives might include hiring new employees, selling your business to buyers, acquiring middlemen (like referring physicians for specialists) and more. Different objectives call for different audiences. All those audiences are on a journey with your brand in the same way that customers are.

Part of choosing objectives is choosing target audiences. If you run an ad campaign with the objective of hiring a good dental hygienist, it looks different from your marketing aimed at prospective patients.

Let’s address one common objection before we close. Many people who have and manage their own businesses tell us, “I have a limited budget. I get that there are all these objectives, but I can’t do them all. So, I’ll just focus on the one that matters most: the decision. After all, that’s the ultimate goal.”

Winning the decision is your goal, but that doesn’t mean you invest everything there. A track athlete’s goal is to win the race. But would you tell a 100-meter sprinter that as long as they run hard on the day of the track meet, they don’t need to train, hydrate or sleep? Consider these two things:

• Crowding: Everyone else is thinking just like you. The most obvious place to advertise is at the point of the decision. You have a lot of competition, and unless there’s something else that makes you stand out, you’re not going to see great return on your investment.

• Timing: How many people are actively looking for a physical therapist at this very minute? On the other hand, how many people are likely to look for a physical therapist in the next few months? Obviously, the second number is much higher.

So the big question for you is: What should your objectives be? How would you rank them? What does your business need the most right now? What will you need next?

In the next post, we’ll talk about how to match your marketing tactics to your objectives.