An analysis – a breakdown – of the various steps your marketing has to go through – is essential to success.
You start with an unknown prospect who has never heard of you, your product, or service.
At the (hopefully) end you have a sale, or at least a lead.
If you aren’t getting the result, it’s a guarantee that one or more of these steps is not getting done, or at least not in enough volume.
If things WERE working and now they aren’t, something changed in one or more of these steps. That can be internal – you stopped doing something or changed something that was working so it is no longer successful.
Or it can be external: Something changed out there. A severe downturn in the economy, a competitor suddenly spending a lot more on their own marketing, are just a couple of examples. There are also seasonal variations in many businesses, that you have to take into account.
Three overall probabilities and numerous possibilities in each case. This is why marketers develop gray hair – and get fired.
The first biggest mistake, of course, is to blame things on the wrong one of these three big factors. Blaming an environmental change, when it was something internal, will at least delay a sensible response.
The concepts of sub-products and sub-statistics are crucial in getting a correct answer to what is going on. Each of those steps in your marketing can be described in terms of a result – a sub-product – necessary in the progress towards the ultimate desired result. For example, knowing who would be interested in your product or service, or getting a potential prospect to your website. There will always be a metric that can measure that, and if you can identify and track these sub-statistics, you can start on the road to understanding what is going on.
You have to conceive of the situation that these sub-statistics add up to.
“People stopped buying because they are scared about the economy”, starts to open the door to doing something about it. Running sales, increasing trust, and lowering the barriers to purchasing are, for example, a usual response to such a scene. But if the problem is your offer is being blown away by a high visibility competitor, that’s not going to cut it.
There are too many possibilities to list them all out. But this gives a general approach that can be applied to any marketing situation.