ENTREPRENEUR TO MILLIONAIRE MYTHS #4 – YOUR MARKETING EFFORTS ARE DOING GREAT

If you think you’re achieving a great return on your marketing because of all the activities you and your team are doing, then you might be shocked at what you are about to learn. As many as 99% of all leaders are more than frustrated with the poor marketing results they are getting.  So, they end up accepting what their marketing produces, settling for mediocre results, or justifying the waste and spend, believing it’s the best they and their marketing can do. 

There is one cold and hard truth about marketing, but even marketing experts don’t want you to know it or use it to measure effectiveness. That is why your marketing spend, your marketing efforts, and your return on marketing is so poor. 

In this article, I’m going to share with you the single most important and only way to measure the effectiveness of your marketing dollars and time.  Once you learn the best and only way to measure marketing production, everything else will become so much easier, and you and your employees can focus on results – becoming a more profitable company and earning a fortune. 

BACKGROUND OF MYTH – YOUR MARKETING EFFORTS ARE DOING GREAT 

Marketing is one of the most significant areas of high spend and low results in every company.  And because fewer than 6% of all CEOs and entrepreneurs have a combination of academic achievement and decades-long experience, they accept the pitiful results instead of demanding optimized marketing performance. 

Having both a degree in marketing, yes, a B.S. – How appropriate! – and becoming a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) of a billion-dollar technology services company and turbo-charging several thousand businesses globally, I can tell you firsthand how distorted and confusing marketing performance is all over the world.  

Back in the late ’90s, when I first became CMO, I had 16 marketing teams in different countries reporting to me. In one of the first meetings, I went around the virtual room and asked each marketing director how they measured success. You guessed it. They all had different answers. Okay, two of them were the same. What’s so fascinating about those answers given over 25 years ago is that they are the same type of answers I hear from marketing directors, teams, and even entrepreneurs today – with just one twist. 

In the past, marketing success was measured by “…traffic, physical attendees, survey forms filled out, completion of ‘awareness campaigns,’ etc.”  What’s different today is the answers are all, and I mean all, “digital.” Marketing success today is tracked as numbers of, or amount of, web traffic, eyeballs, impressions, CTRs, shares, likes, comments, followers, numbers of contacts in the database, pages loaded, downloads, views, virtual attendees, engagement, visits (total, unique, and duration), bounce rates, email (open, bounce, share), subscribers, rankings, and so on.  

The reason that “Your Marketing Is Doing Great!” is a myth and not a truth is because the above list from marketing people and how they measure marketing success can all fall into the “bucket of activities.” And that is where and why marketing fails. Believing that more activities will lead to more results or business growth (and hopefully revenue growth if you’ve read my book (see a full reference to it below) or listened to my speeches).  That is basing success on hope, not intelligent design and performance management. 

Full disclosure! I totally understand the fascination and flow of “impressions to views – to subscribers – to conversions – to ad revenue and affiliate traffic to order and commissions” because I became an official “YouTuber” a few weeks ago. My InTents Glamping channel has achieved YouTube Partner Program status (you have to earn it – can’t buy it), monetizing the videos with ads, shared premium revenues, and other revenue streams. But that is a digital model with no tangible inventory and no human sales interactions. That’s not the type of company that most people are running. It’s a hobby business for me and I’m not trying to make millions from it – yet. 

To turn the “Your Marketing Is Doing Great!” from a myth to sustainable results, here is how you have to measure marketing success.  It’s quite simple, just not easy.  Your marketing is doing great when it is achieving one thing, one specific and measurable goal (SMART Goal if you like) – and that is producing qualified leads at the rate you must have.  Or, more precisely, your PCP (read about PCP in Chapter 5 –  Targeting Your Sweet Spot of Phase Market Ready in my book) leads to meet the growth goals for your business. 

Note: Not just leads, not just suspects, but “qualified leads.”  That one little qualifier – the word “qualified” – is what qualifies your marketing to determine if it is great or not – nothing else. Your company can have all the activities in the world, but those actions will never guarantee you will hit the threshold of “qualified leads” your business must have to achieve explosive revenue growth numbers year after year. 

SUMMARY

If your business is like the other 99.99% of companies who don’t have enough high-quality, qualified leads, then you must accept the fact that “Your Marketing Is Not Doing Great.”  It’s probably just doing. Stop settling or accepting those poor results. Work with your marketing team and your executive leaders to determine exactly the number of PCP qualified leads you must have each week or month to meet the demand to hit your revenue growth targets.  

Then, reverse engineer your marketing efforts (see Chapter 9 – Marketing Demand Creation in my book) to create a perfect mix of marketing activities and demand creation strategies to consistently shatter your lead thresholds every month. In most cases, you can eliminate about 50% of your current marketing activities and still double your sales growth – without spending any more money! That’s the roadmap to creating business wealth. 

TIME TO ACT NOW

To learn how to do all of these things – generate as many “qualified leads” as fast as possible and to create competitive advantage, get a copy of my book Entrepreneur To Millionaire: How To Build A Highly Profitable Fast Growth Company And Become Embarrassingly Rich Doing It (McGraw Hill, 2021). Make sure everyone on your team, not just your leaders, sales, and marketing people, read the book and start following the E2M Roadmap™.  That is how you and your employees can quickly make a fortune with even fewer marketing activities and spend – Making Your Marketing Great. 

Watch for my next article destroying the myth: “A lead is a lead is a lead.” 

BOOK INFORMATION

Is Your Business Growing or Creating Wealth?

       “A must-read book.” —Mark Cuban

Amazon: https://amzn.to/2WJSNYw

Kindle Edition – https://amzn.to/2Kw9cgW

Bulk Sales 25+ for 40% off www.porchlightbooks.com

AUTHOR BACKGROUND

Kent Billingsley is the founder and president of the Revenue Growth® Company, LLC (TRGC). He is a published author, international keynote speaker, and business transformation expert. He has become America’s Revenue Growth® Architect by helping thousands of entrepreneurs and CEOs (representing over a million employees) generate several billion in new sales, as well as tens of billions in new revenue and profits for large corporations. He has personally designed, built, transformed, and turbocharged several thousand organizations in 36 countries. Over the last 20 years, his proprietary content and trademarked programs have helped thousands of entrepreneurs and employees become millionaires and multimillionaires by “creating wealth” inside their companies. He can be reached at [email protected].