‘Those guys are all over Social Media like a cheap suit!’
We’ve all thought it or heard someone say it in relation to a competitor who ‘just seems to be everywhere’. How are they doing it? How can they afford it? Who have they hired to do it for them? Oh my god, they must be making a fortune and are about to steal all our customers…if we don’t do something fast, we’re going out of business!!
If you’re the leader in your business, this generally results in a mild form of panic and you hiring the first person off the street who sweet talks you with a few lines about how they’re ‘the boss man’ at marketing and how they’ll sort your SEO out, get you to the top page on Google, get you firing on social media, set you up on a marketing automation platform and spice up your website… the works!
Before you know it, you’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars and are left with a niggling suspicion that had you not spent the money, your business would be in exactly the same place as it would have been otherwise…well except for the fact that you’d still have those tens of thousands of $$.
Make sure you’ve got something worth talking about
Ok, so maybe the above scenario is a bit of an exaggeration, but it’s not actually that far from what we see all the time!
Of course, there’s nothing wrong at all with spending money trying to promote your business and making use of the sweet marketing tools available; the issue comes when businesses forget that spending money on promotion and/or distribution or the latest marketing automation tools is all but useless if you haven’t spent the time, effort and money on making sure you’ve got something worth promoting in the first place.
Consider these questions:
- What use is it spending thousands of dollars on SEO to make your website appear in more searches if, when someone lands on your site, the user experience, messaging and visuals are all over the place?
- What use is it spending $1000 a month to get a top marketing automation platform if you don’t have a decent content strategy and have no content production engine in place?
- What use is it investing in a LinkedIn Ad program to promote your business if, when a person contacts you, they’re not given a person-to-person experience that makes them want to work with you?
- What use is it investing time, effort and $ into a Facebook page if the vast majority of your potential customers don’t transact on Facebook with the type of service you’re offering?
In B2B businesses, where there are challenges in presenting yourself in a unique, differentiated way (such as in the ICT industry that Mogrify works so much with), you can only patch over a ‘me too’ message for so long by throwing money at promotion/ distribution and the latest tools.
Sooner or later, you have to invest the time to clearly define what it is you’re marketing, who you’re marketing it to, and uncovering why they would care! Every dollar you spend on promotion or distribution before you’ve properly done this is going to be a dollar that you don’t use efficiently. At worst, it’s a dollar completely wasted.
In high-value sales, with long sales cycles, make sure you’re building marketing assets
Mogrify works with some of the top mid-sized IT companies in Australia and we see the pressure to spend on promotion all the time. It’s easy to get carried away spending vendor dollars but the truth is that – if you don’t have the right marketing foundations in place – the effort that this takes can do your business more harm than good. Our customers recognise this. With our help, they invest in the right message, the right marketing assets and the right process, and only THEN will they focus on the promotion and distribution of this message.
A dollar spent on getting your marketing infrastructure and content asset library in place is a dollar that’s spent building a long-term asset for your company. What’s more, it’s a dollar spent that will increase the effectiveness of any future investments you make on promotion/distribution and marketing tools.
Mogrify’s long-view model is what makes us different
Mogrify’s business model is, as far as we know, unique in our space. We purposefully invest in building long term relationships with our customers where marketing is an activity that happens over the mid-long term – and not just on the short-term / campaign basis.
We help our customers create assets that can be utilised immediately, and in the future – but only after we have clearly defined the marketing message and roadmap. We take the time to know our customers’ businesses and – as a result – take pride in the fact that we know them like no one else could. The result? We help them spend less money with us than they might be willing to which to us is a good thing – because we are in it for the long term.
If you’re navigating the mine-field of how to best spend your B2B marketing dollars, see how you perform against core marketing areas and what you should be focusing on with our quick (and free) online B2B Marketing Assessment.
