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September 23, 2015

Don’t Be an Idiot When Making Marketing & Sales Decisions

idiot 1How do you make your marketing & sales decisions?

For example…

  • What topics do you choose to blog about?
  • How do you decide what your ads will say?
  • Why don’t you Tweet?

For most people and most firms… these kinds of decisions are often made by the senior executive at the firm… who relies (far too much, IMHO) on his or her own feelings… on what they think ought to happen… and on what their gut tells them to do. And even if it’s a reasonably well-informed gut – it’s still boils down to just a guess.

Here’s my point: When it comes to making marketing & sales decisions, forget your own interests, preferences, ego, emotion, background and gut feel… to be successful, follow the outcomes of the measurement! Any other way is simply the wrong way!

To follow-up on the examples above…

  • Don’t write articles and blog posts about what you want to write about… write about what your clients and prospects want to read about. Go back and take a look at your Google Analytics, the click-thrus from your emails (to the blogs/articles on your website) or the metrics (views, likes, comments) on your LinkedIn posts. Use that data to help determine which topics resonate best with the marketplace and write about those in future posts.
  • When advertising… test different headlines / different visuals / different content / different calls-to-action… and track the results over time. This applies to print ads, online banner ads and pay-per-click ads, too. Don’t dismiss advertising as ineffective because the one ad you ran one time didn’t cause the phone to ring off the hook!
  • I once had the owner of a research firm tell me that she didn’t “get” Twitter. Guess what? It doesn’t matter! The only thing that matters is the potential effectiveness of Twitter (and all social media platforms, for that matter) as a marketing channel. Which topics get the most clicks? Which #hashtags work best? What time(s) of the day should you Tweet? Use the built-in analytics to monitor activity… or use Google Analytics to track links from Twitter to your website.

These are just three examples. This same kind of thinking applies to any and all marketing and sales activities! So when it comes right down to it… when making marketing & sales decisions, don’t be an idiot and let your own biases, ego and preferences get in the way of smart choices. It’s not personal… it’s business! The data you need to inform your choices is easy and quick to get to – it’s up to you to take advantage of it.


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