There are five primary reasons why marketing programs fall short:
- Failing to maximize potential response through inaccurate targeting (not accurately knowing your customer universe)
- Improper alignment of messaging with customer segments or a one-size-fits-all message ‘strategy’ (lack of resonance)
- Unnecessarily high contact expense (low revenue per contact) due to too broad a target profile, a contact frequency that is needlessly high or an unnecessarily expensive contact piece
- No mechanism to gather meaningful business intelligence (failure to test)
- No mechanism to gather meaningful business intelligence (failure to test) (this wasn’t a mistake — you get the point)
Most programs completely overlook that last item. There must always be a carefully planned ‘test’ embedded in every MarCom program. Simply comparing one Johnson Box to another won’t cut it. Before we can consistently market to our customer base with predictable results there is a great deal of preparation to be done. This process is vital and incremental. Every marketing opportunity is an opportunity to build business intelligence.
Admittedly there’s a lot more glitz and glamour in the creative process. But we’re in business to make money. And to do that better than our competitors we have to consistently run smarter, more profitable programs. Well prepared, intelligently designed and efficiently executed programs are the only way — no matter how much we’d rather be rolling paint — or in my case, finding someone else to do it.
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