Tuesday Marketing Notes (Number 29—April 17th, 2006)

A B2B Marketing Newsletter for BMA Members
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When Marketing Programs Crash: Five Danger Signs of a Dysfunctional Marketing Program (Part 1)

 by Eric Gagnon

Dysfunctional systems and behavior exist everywhere, from nations and cultures all the way down to families and people. When marketing programs become dysfunctional, the people running the marketing program—the marketing manager, product manager, marketing team, and agency, are either doing the right things in the wrong way, or—which is more likely—they aren’t doing the things they should be doing.

Marketing programs can go dysfunctional quickly or slowly over time, but they will always crash faster if the marketing team has no grasp of the essential values required for success in B2B marketing programs. These values comprise a mindset which is required to develop and execute serious marketing programs that generate sales response.

Many of these danger signs show themselves through lack of competence, experience, awareness, or skill on the part of marketing managers and the agencies serving them, but sometimes even the most experienced marketing managers and agency pros get lazy and lose focus on these principles, through lack of attention, inertia, or getting too close to the company or client for too long.

These danger signs are a wakeup call for marketing managers to spot when they’re getting into trouble, and smart agencies who know these signs can help their clients make the changes to turn the company’s marketing program around and get it back on track.

Ranked from bad to worse, here they are . . .

5: Phony Marketingspeak Copy Fatigue Syndrome

Marketing managers who have been on the job awhile, and the agencies serving them, invariably get lazy on copy and presentation they use in their deliverables for their marketing programs.

The same copy used in one ad is then copied into another ad, and this copy tends to be re-used over and over without making the extra effort to write new copy for the marketing project at hand, or to target this copy to the needs and wants of a new prospect, market, or opportunity.

Once copy fatigue sets in,revisions on this recycled copy become cluttered with marketing buzzwords, and eventually copy becomes little more than strung-together bullet points and industry catchphrases: “best practices,” “Industry compliant,” “unprecedented performance,” “cutting edge,” “enterprise wide,” etc., used as copy wallpaper to fill space on marketing deliverables. Marketing buzzwords turned into meaningless bullet-points become the lazy copywriter’s shortcut, instead of writing serious copy using hard benefits that are meaningful to the reader.

This phony marketing-speak is the main reason why your prospects have tuned out, and don’t trust, most marketing. And when phony marketingspeak happens, copy no longer serves the function of persuading and informing the reader, because the marketing team lost sight of this goal and has been coasting. Response to ads, mailings, and other marketing activities slowly declines until the sales department starts complaining they aren’t getting enough leads, or the CEO starts to wonder why he’s spending so much money on the company’s ads and mailings and not getting any return from it. 

You are much better off using the plain, clearly persuasive language of the effective salesman in copy, written fresh for each new potential prospect in each new marketing project, than hitting copy/paste with the more polished, but tired, old marketingspeak from last year’s ad layout. 

4: Spending Too Much for Too Long (Or, Thinking You Don’t Have To Spend It)

Spending too much for too long on the wrong marketing programs, or thinking you don’t have to spend much at all, are other danger signs of a dysfunctional marketing program.

Spending in the wrong places: The most common part of this two-sided problem are companies that spend too much of their marketing budgets on activities that aren’t generating sales response—inquiries, leads, and orders. Usually this means spending too much on broad image-building marketing programs, like big print ad buys or PR programs, instead of on direct mail, trade shows or other, more targeted marketing projects.

Another way companies waste money is by running too long with marketing programs that aren’t working. Examples of this would be running ad campaigns or mailing programs that clearly aren’t pulling sales leads. A myth  perpetuated by trade publication ad sales reps is the idea that ads need to “build awareness.” Ads either work (i.e., generate sales leads), or they don’t, and if an ad doesn’t generate enough leads from the first placement, it won’t generate much more the second time it appears. And don’t think you’re going to get better results from the second mailing in a series if the first mailing piece didn’t work so well on the same list.

The same goes for paying PR firms a stiff monthly retainer to stroke the trade media for your company. If the puff pieces they’re getting written about your company aren’t making the phones ring with interested prospects, sales leads, and new business inquiries (and they usually don’t), then you know you should be spending this money somewhere else.

Getting your company locked into a losing marketing program of ads, mailings, or PR for a three to six-month period is a good way to burn up most of your annual marketing budget. Stop whatever it is you’re doing that isn’t working, cut your losses, and try something new and completely different—fast.

To make it, you have to spend it: The flip side of this problem is when companies and clients try to run their marketing programs on the cheap. Companies, especially start-ups, get misled into thinking they can market and sell their products exclusively with Internet-based marketing—i.e., without spending hard dollars for marketing in the real world.

When someone tells me they want to market their product using “viral marketing,” they are telling me they either don’t have any money, or they aren’t willing or aware enough to know they need to spend money to market their products in the real world, using real marketing methods. Viral marketing has obviously worked very well for Internet-only companies like Hotmail and Google; however, viral marketing practices don’t work to any meaningful degree for most B2B companies selling real products for real money in the real world. The unavoidable fact is you have to run direct mail, place ads, and get your company into trade shows. This costs money.

Direct mail testing and other live market-testing projects go a long way toward minimizing risk and expense, and they show the way to where you should be spending money in your marketing program. But even these activities cost something, and at some point, the marketing manager has to convince the CEO to pull the trigger and spend some money. There is no other way to find out if your marketing program will work.

3: Obsessing on the Trivial Stuff

Believe it or not, this is getting to be a big one, and all of us on the agency side experience it every day: Greenhorn marketing managers obsessing over design, colors, and layouts in ads, mailings, and other deliverables. Endless revisions on copy that go well beyond what was needed, into editing for editing’s sake, like a dog marking its territory on a tree.

Tying up your marketing team by focusing on trivial design and layout issues, and second-guessing your ad agency or marketing consultant’s design skill interferes with timely marketing execution and causes you to lose focus on what’s important: Getting the ad placed or the mailing dropped on time!

Either you trust your marketing team’s skill, or you don’t. If you do, get out of the way and let your team do their job. If you don’t, then hire a new agency.

I’ve been in B2B marketing a long time, and through more of these endless revision loops than I’d like to remember, and I can tell you one thing: No marketing deliverable we ever produced was ever actually improved beyond three revision cycles, and no change beyond this ever made any difference in the final marketing result. Never. I can guarantee that all of my brothers and sisters on the agency side will agree.

When non-designers play at being ad designers, they stop doing what they’re supposed to do, which is run their marketing programs and meet their deadlines. That’s execution, the most important part of marketing. Endless fiddling undermines confidence and is the counterproductive enemy of solid and timely marketing execution. Don’t do it.

2: Not Measuring—and Not Admitting What Can’t Be Measured

“Metrics” is the hot new buzzword in marketing. Marketing managers who had it easy during the Dot-com boom years are suddenly discovering they now have to track response, but like many issues in marketing, there’s a lot of hype and nonsense being thrown into this topic you have to weed through to get to the truth.

The plain fact is that marketing teams who say they have a “metrics” problem really mean to say their marketing program isn’t generating sales leads. In the real world, this comes from running fluffy, branding-oriented marketing programs that don’t make a compelling case for the product to its prospect, and running these programs too long eventually causes the company’s sales team to complain that marketing programs aren’t generating sales leads for them.

Let’s not kid ourselves: Many B2B marketing programs have lost sight of their main goal of generating sales response. When marketing programs don’t generate inquiries, leads, or orders, finding different ways to measure nothing is still measuring nothing, and it won’t be too long before the marketing manager has lost their job, or the agency loses a client.

If you’re marketing a good product at a good price, and if the copy and layout of every deliverable and activity in a company’s marketing program is designed from the ground up to use hard, clear presentationto present and sell the benefits and features of the company’s products, in language that is compelling to the target audience, the marketing program stands a good chance of generating sales leads, which can be measured through the simple tasks of counting Web clicks, phone calls, reply cards, and other ways prospects contact your company, and then tracking those results through your sales cycle. Ads and other marketing deliverables are either designed to generate sales leads, or they aren’t, and many these days fall into the latter category.

The flip side of this problem is the belief that all results from every marketing program can be measured from some kind of super-exact “marketing dashboard,” when the fact is, they can’t.

For example, it’s difficult to measure accurate response from print advertising, even when using trackable URLs, order phone numbers, or key-coded ads. Prospects don’t remember where they heard about your product, or they don’t care enough to remember which ad they saw, or where they saw it. They will see your ad this week, forget about it, then call your company six months from now. This also happens to a lesser extent with direct mail and other marketing activities.

The best way to develop measurability in your marketing program is to start with deliverables that are designed to generate sales response. Produce your ads using clear, powerful presentation, and use a strong call to action to motivate your readers to take the next step closer to buying your product—link to your Web site, call your company, etc. Then, make sure you track these responses for every ad, mailing, and other marketing activity.

There will always be a portion of your marketing program that refuses to be measured by strict ROI benchmarks. The best way to measure your marketing program is to do your best to count inquiries, leads, and (if you can) sales from your ads, mailings, and other activities, and calculate your cost-per-lead figures for these activities.

Then, combine these numbers with your calculation of the lifetime value of each customer to your company. This tells you how your marketing costs stack up against the big picture of the lifefime sales from each new customer acquired. This is more of a true reflection of your company’s marketing investment than the fool’s errand of trying to measure ROI on each ad or mailing.

While it’s likely you still won’t receive a 100% accurate measurement of these activities, you will instill your marketing program with the discipline of accountability, which is a good thing. More importantly, you’ll be generating more than enough sales leads to make the issue of exact measurability a moot point.

And the most common sign of a dysfunctional B2B marketing program is . . .

1: Marketing Not Focused on Serving Sales and Lead Generation

The ultimate goal of your B2B marketing program is to generate sales. For most B2B companies selling higher-ticket products, this means generating sales reponse—inquiries, leads, and (in some cases), direct orders.

This means every marketing activity you execute for your company or client must be focused on the goal of generating sales response, and not the weak hope of building brand awareness or some other distant, less tangible objective.

Over time, marketing programs lose sight of this purpose, and this lack of focus increases sharply with increases in marketing budgets. Marketing departments drift away from their critical role serving the company’s sales function, and what happens next is marketing happening for the sake of marketing, to chase the soft, unmeasurable rainbows of branding, mindshare, reader awareness, and the other excuses for bad marketing that are now part of today’s fluffy marketing lexicon.

In companies where marketing is serving the needs of sales, and getting out ahead to develop new markets and opportunities, and where marketing results can be measured, the sales VP and his/her team aren’t questioning marketing’s contribution to sales. The marketing problems which do occur can usually be solved through two remedies that can be readily put into action by any good marketing team: Clearer and more effective presentation of the product’s most compelling sales benefits, and better, more timely marketing execution.

B2B marketing is a staff service function to the company’s sales operations. It’s not some kind of creative boutique that operates according to its own rules, generating results that have no bearing on the goal of making sales or building new business for the company. Watch for these danger signs, and practice the positive values that prevent these problems from taking root, and you’ll give your own marketing program a good foundation for generating solid sales response for your company or client.

Next week, we’ll cover the flip side of this issue and discuss ways to re-boot a crashed B2B marketing program . . .

Comments? Questions? Send them to me at: eric@realmarkets.net

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Eric Gagnon (eric@realmarkets.net), is president of GAA (www.realmarkets.net), a sales and business development consulting firm, and is the author of The Marketing Manager’s Handbook, the master study guide for the Business Marketing Association’s Marketing Skills Assessment, Skill Builder, and Certification (MSA/B/C) programs.

For more information on The Marketing Manager’s Handbook, available to BMA members at a special discount, link to:

http://www.businessmarketinginstitute.com/book.html

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Test, Train, and Build Your B2B Marketing Skills for Better Sales Success: BMA Announces New Assessment, Training, and Certification for B2B Marketing Managers

For more information on the new BMA Marketing Skills Assessment, Skill Building and Certification (MSA/B/C) training and professional development program, visit http://www.businessmarketinginstitute.com