Marketing Tips | December

Tip 12 - Don’t spread yourself too thinly. Do a few things brilliantly rather than trying to do everything!

There are so many tools available to the modern marketer, but time, skills and budget are limiting factors. So, focus on the things you can do brilliantly, and that will work. Only choose marketing tactics that will help you achieve the goals you’ve set.

Applying the 80/20 rule

Have you heard of the Pareto principle? It’s sometimes known as the 80/20 rule. The idea is that 80% of the outcomes can be attributed to 20% of the causes for a given event. For example, 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your customers, or 80% of your marketing revenue comes from 20% of your marketing activities.

That can be a slightly depressing message for a marketer. If you read marketing press and blogs, you’d be forgiven for thinking that you must have a strategy for Content, for Search Engine Optimisation, for Social Media – the list goes on and on.

But the reality is very different. It might just be you doing the marketing, and you might be doing it alongside running your business! It just isn’t practical to implement every single marketing tactic. You’ll just spread yourself too thinly and won’t see the results you want.

But if you focus on:

- What you can do brilliantly with the skills and resources to hand

- What works for your business.

You can start to apply the 80/20 rule to your marketing.

Identify what’s working

Go back to your marketing plan and look at the results you’ve achieved to date. What has worked? What hasn’t? Look at the customers you want to attract. Where do they go for information? If you think they will find you through Google, have you investigated how competitive the search terms are? Have you got the resources to optimise your website and content to attract this traffic? If the answer to that is no, ask yourself whether you want to invest in this as a marketing tactic. If you’re competing for keywords against big brands who have a dedicated team of staff and marketing agencies, you’re just not going to be able to compete.

If you target families, what are the best ways to reach them? What are the most effective media channels for you? For example, if advertising in Primary Times, email marketing and Facebook campaigns work for you, cut back on the other activities and invest more time in the channels that are working for you. That might mean:

- investing in research with customers to inform campaigns

- Enlisting the services of a creative partner to develop more impactful advertising in your chosen channels.

But it’s worth it. You'll be improving on what works, rather than trying to cover all bases, yet not generating any new customers or additional revenue. In short, you’re applying the 80/20 rule to increase results.

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket

Just a warning though, beware of ‘putting all your eggs in one basket’. If you become overly reliant on one marketing approach, you could be leaving yourself exposed. For example, back in 2011 Google made huge changes to search algorithms (known as the Panda and Penguin changes) and began to penalise some websites. I won’t go into the details, but Google’s aim was to weed out poor quality sites and websites that had unnatural weblinks. Many companies who had been in the Google top spots were suddenly blacklisted by Google. This resulted in some organisations going out of business.

This is an extreme example, but it’s one to think about. By focusing on the Pareto principle, you can identify what marketing tactics are working and make tweaks to improve your results. And because you’ll be dropping non-performing activities, you won’t have to increase the level of effort or budget to improve your return. That sounds pretty good to me.

<back