Marketing professionals have so many tactics they can deploy. The list seems endless and always changing and evolving. What should I focus on? How can I grow my brand? Where should I invest?

A recent client was faced with this dilemma in their start-up food business . Struggling with an overwhelming amount of choices, I asked her one simple question.

What evidence do you have that one of your marketing actions has moved the needle?

Beyond the anecdotal, do you have any metric that gives you confidence that something has helped you achieve your stated goal?

Moving the Needle, Stitching a Plan

What she told me was that she was clueless because she spent most of her day trying the latest thing without any idea of what success might look like. She tested based on hunches, not numbers. She felt that measuring wasn’t possible. So she kept spending money without keeping score.

With the End in Mind. What does success look like for your activities? Do you have some way of identifying that something is working? Have you built into the design any form of tracking that helps you know where your leads came from, buying patterns or the influence of activities on those purchases?

My advice to my client was to stop everything she called marketing.

Just stop. Cancel her ads in the magazines, stop posting to social media, stop sponsoring local events and let’s begin first with a well-defined strategy.

We spent several weeks working on that strategy that was a clear and precise articulation of her brand’s promise. What they stood for, how their brand behaved in the marketplace versus her competitors. And with this strategy in mind, we set up single-minded tests to see if we could move the needle with tactics. But, we did them one at a time with a clear line for success.

We started with email marketing campaigns that needed to return a certain number of leads that converted to sales. And for several months, this was a solo focus for her and her small team. We tracked, we analyzed and we studied response rates. We did some A/B testing of images and messages to see what got opened and clicked through more efficiently.

Lessons in Simplicity

When you are doing so many things, it is hard to know if anything is working. When you slow down and do one thing at a time, you can go into that program with more depth. You can study each tactic with greater precision and then render judgment. This works. This doesn’t work. Let’s stick with it or move on.

I’m a big fan of trying to convince myself that something is working before I try and convince others. Maybe it is me, but I find it hard to focus on so many activities at once that my effort is a mile wide and an inch deep.

So today’s marketing lesson. Start with a clear strategy. Pick one tactic to test. Prove to yourself it works before you try several other approaches. Create some scorecard that simply measures performance. It will be imperfect but it at least helps you identify a single metric that informs you that you are moving the needle. If it is working, maybe the right thing to do is to do more of it, not to add on and make things more complicated.

Wasteful marketing is the tax you pay when you don’t focus your efforts.

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Need help sorting out your marketing? Unclear what is and isn’t working? Contact me here and together; we can move the needle.

Photo: By Hannes Grobe (own work, Schulhistorische Sammlung Bremerhaven) [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

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