Over the last 20 years, businesses have come to rely on and adapted to marketing their business online. I’ve worked with thousands of businesses and after hearing the good, bad, and ugly stories I realized the secret missing link for most businesses. Before I get into that specifically, I want to share the two most common statements I’ve heard from business owners and they are:
- I used a marketing company and paid thousands of dollars with no results or
- I have a company for Facebook ads, one does my direct mail, one for my website, and my ‘insert employee here’ to post on social media.
Let’s take point #1, many of us have spent money on a marketing company that promised the world, x amount of leads, they would improve revenue within 3 months, on and on, but all of them failed to include the missing link. Relying on a marketing company to drive traffic to your website, get people to click on your ad, buy your product or arrive in the door of your business is only one part of the entire marketing process. The businesses that have figured this out not only survive but thrive and had to overcome the next part by rolling up their sleeves, ask the right questions, have the process drawn out, and even learn the nomenclature like bounce rate, impression share, or the dreaded click-through rate. They did this in order to understand the missing link between marketing companies and all businesses.
Point #2, we’ve all pieced together our marketing along the way. Maybe it was due to budget, or we knew someone that does online marketing or we did our online research and the reviews for x company looked good. The problem with patchwork marketing is an inconsistent message. Let me give you an example, you are paying $1,500 to market on Facebook, your ad is on point, you get someone interested in your product or service, they click on the ad and you send them to your website, they get there and it has a completely different message then what the person just viewed or the went to a landing page and see it’s you but have no idea what they should do next. This is because you have one company doing your Facebook ads, one that set up your website or landing page, and your business’s message is being communicated by two people that have their own understanding of what you do. You paid to interest someone and then have them lose interest, like a movie that you went to see because of the trailer only to have the best parts of the movie be what you viewed in the trailer, a big let down.
If you scrolled to this part without reading my two-points above, well I don’t blame you, I want to get to the point as well. So here it is, the big reveal, the missing link for any company using a marketing company is having an exact process that connects the marketing leads from the vendor with what happens in the business. Now before you go, wait that’s it?, let me explain. Businesses rely on marketing companies to get leads but almost none ask how do we track them so they show they came from x platform, or better yet, train your staff to continue the message the marketing company used to drive the person into the business. This also works for businesses that sell products online, does the marketing vendor give you a list of the people that bought because they clicked on the ad, or filled out info from the landing page? We can really get into this with call tracking numbers, google tags, Facebook pixels, etc… but let’s not overlook the point, if you want to ensure you don’t change marketing companies every 6 months or you are getting your ROI from the marketing company, connect the leads with what happens in the business and you will be ahead of 90% of businesses.
CGS has this dialed in so that all new clients know exactly what was produced, how that equated to leads that arrive or buy the product and they can see what happened after the lead gets generated. Imagine knowing where your money is going and what money you are getting from that exact purchase, it changes how your business grows, how you can keep good employees with coordinated training, and even how you can have more time to work on expanding your business to get to that next level.
