REDUCE YOUR WASTE LINE

Key to improving your bottom line is shrinking your “waste” line. That is, dramatically reducing the amount of resources wasted when marketing to dirty lists, delivering poor offers, reacting slowly or not at all with responders, etc.

Unfortunately, in many businesses, wasted marketing efforts are a chronic occurrence. Obviously, nothing is perfect. But our goal is to help marketers do as much as they can to eliminate those wasted efforts.

Some examples of marketing waste:

• The company that “reacts” to a slow quarter by quickly creating a down and dirty direct response campaign to boost numbers. The offer isn’t fresh. Lists aren’t clean, or an overused in-house list has been tapped once again. The result? Sluggish response and lower quality responders that lead to little or no increase in sales.
• The company that generates “tons” of new suspects via content syndication, adwords programs and events without an adequate way to filter, score and follow up on them. Either inside sales is too limited in bandwidth and many leads go stale. Or, they do follow up on them, find the first 5% to be poor quality, then give up on the rest. The good leads go untouched.
• A company runs a very expensive direct mail program without solid offer content to support it. While the package is impactful, the offer falls short. The extra expense of the high-end mailer is wasted.
• A company’s demand generation efforts continue to target low quality, purchased lists. The leads from these programs are fed to sales reps, but are lower in relevance and quality. Despite the quantity of leads, sales reps are left starving for quality leads. They then spend significant time scrounging on their own when they should be on the phones.

There are dozens more examples we see every day of wasted marketing resources. To help alleviate the scale of these wasted resources, we help clients look at the entire sales/marketing cycle and ferret out the most potentially wasteful activities that limit their Return on Marketing Investment. 

Both our Data-Driven Direct and Sales-Based Marketing approaches help us make sure we minimize wasted efforts. In addition, we look at offer content (is it that 6-month old white paper, or something new and compelling?), offer tiers, offer sequencing, personalization, frequency of touch points, verticalization, target audience tendencies, etc.

And we recommend testing scenarios that help protect you against “betting the farm” on a list, offer or messaging architecture that may not be as successful as you hoped.

Once the campaign is underway, we continue to monitor what’s working to ensure we don’t reinvest in a tactic that is not returning value. We can then make adjustments to the campaign while it’s in progress, addressing whatever factors we see that might improve potential response. 

What can you do to decrease wasted efforts and resources within your demand generation programs? Contact us today and we’ll set up a review of your programs and analyze your results.