Barbecued Marketing

The Best Marketing Takes Time

Great marketing is like great barbeque… magical.

The thing that makes barbeque so ridiculously good is that, if done right, it can arguably be better than a steak, better than lobster, better than most anything you can eat.  And it often starts with a mediocre cut of meat – brisket.  What makes this so?

Preparation.


There’s a place in Austin, Texas called Franklin Barbeque.  If you go to their website you’ll see why people literally stand in line for hours to get their fill.  It states they are, “Serving the best barbeque in the known universe.”  That’s a bold statement.  But I’ve eaten it, and they make a good case.  My son has learned tips on how they make it from Aaron Franklin himself on MasterClass.  It takes him about 7 hours to make their style BBQ.  I’m not sure it’s exactly as good as Franklin’s, but it’s always a real treat and way better than any BBQ I’ve ever made.

This is the approach companies need to take regarding generating revenue.  All too often, I meet business leaders who are looking for a quick fix.  The problem with quick fixes is that they are just that – fixes.  They are not long-term solutions.  Worse, a quick fix (which often takes the form of a discount) can juice short-term demand but erode the brand’s value… training customers to wait for the next sale.

The right approach is in developing your positioning, measuring, and testing capabilities:

Positioning: Your company’s story

Mid to long term growth requires preparation.  Start with your story.  The following questions are a good starting point:

  • Who are you as a business?
  • Are you positive your products and services are crystal clear to a casual website visitor?
  • Why should people care?

If you haven’t done solid research to answer these questions, chances are your message is not doing its job in separating you from your competition.  Speaking of competition, your positioning needs to take into consideration who you are competing against in your market.  Trying to craft your message in a vacuum misses the point.  People will compare you to other companies via a quick Google search.  Keep this in mind, when you are crafting your story.

Measuring Marketing ROI

I rarely meet a business leader that doesn’t bring up return on investment (ROI).  A typical conversation starts like this.

Me:   What are your goals?
Prospective Client (PC):  I would like to grow revenue in these areas.
Me:  What is your marketing budget?
PC:  What’s a marketing budget?
Me:  According to current benchmarks, your marketing budget should be about _____% (based on current research).
PC:  That’s a lot.  What kind of ROI can I expect?
Me:  There are several factors that play into…
PC:  How fast can I expect the return?

ROI is always at the beginning of a conversation.  However, not everyone understands it.  So, let’s go into it.  First ROI is literally a mathematical function:

Return / Investment

Using this formula, if I get $7 from a $1 investment, my ROI is 7.  Meaning that for each additional dollar I spend, I should expect a return of 7 dollars back.  (As I say this, I can almost hear my economics professors cringe about the law of diminishing returns.  So, yes, this is not a linear function that stretches on for infinity.)

The investment part is straightforward.  How much money are you putting into the effort?

The problem is that most businesses have difficulty measuring return.  You need to ensure that you have a direct measurable line from the beginning of awareness through to seeing the money hit the bank.  Most of the time, I find that companies aren’t measuring this completely.  They measure what is happening to drive traffic to the website (aka clickstream data), but they don’t connect this activity with their CRM and purchase behavior.  Ask yourself:

  • Do I know how much revenue each channel (events, LinkedIn, television, etc.) is delivering?
  • Do I know if this revenue is from new or returning clients?
  • How optimized is my sales pipeline? In other words, am I certain that when the phone rings a sales rep will care for the lead appropriately.

Unless you can confidently answer these questions, you can’t measure ROI.  And even if you can answer these questions, you still must deal with attribution.  For example, if someone visits your website initially because of a Google Ad but comes back 3 months later due to a webinar and makes a purchase, how do you attribute credit for the sale between these two efforts?  This is the subject for another time.

A/B Testing

If you’re able to connect the dots on what is driving revenue, you’ll want to continually improve results.  Most business leaders know that A/B testing is running 2 versions of a creative and seeing which performs better.  What they don’t know is that this is one of the first things to go by the wayside when teams become overworked.  Why?

There is a vicious untruth that more is better.  The thinking is that more emails, more social posts, more mailings, et cetera leads to more revenue.  So, volume becomes the focus instead of the revenue.  When this happens, a team needs to choose between getting smarter through testing (and falling behind in content creation) or simply pumping out more content to keep their bosses happy.

If you’re not learning, you’re not growing.  And if you’re not growing, you’re dying.  Ask yourself:

  • Does my team know how to properly implement A/B testing?
  • Do the test metrics directly support our revenue goals?
  • What are we testing? Channels?  Audiences?  Ads?  Offers?

To wrap this all up, preparation needs to be done to deliver the mouth-watering results you’re looking for.  Creating the right story is at the heart of your efforts.  It flavors everything you do to generate revenue.  You can’t win with a losing message.

Secondly, proper measurement is key to understanding what is working and what isn’t.  In our analogy, the greatest BBQ chef’s process uses measurements (cook time, seasoning ratios, heating temperatures, resting time).  In the same way, you’ll need to have access to reporting that correctly shows ROI so you can make macro-improvements to your revenue generation efforts.

Finally, long-term growth is in the fine details.  Although Franklin BBQ has a phenomenal product, they continue to tweak their process to improve.  In the same way, A/B testing will allow you to improve over the long term.