Excerpt from The Creative Sales & Marketing Manual...
Chapter 5
The 4As of MarketingWhat constitutes effective marketing?
Effective marketing is NOT about winning awards. It IS about making sure that your organization gets the dollars it needs to keep its doors open and hopefully, report a profit.
Profitability keeps your employees and you employed. Therefore, effective marketing is determined by our ability to find new ways to generate reliable revenues from current and future customers.
That’s where most marketing fails. Humor for the sake of humor and creativity for the sake of creativity won’t pay the bills or keep you employed.
Before spending a single cent on anything that’s supposed to generate revenues for the company, ask these questions. They are the questions that really matter.
1. Will it/Did it create revenue?
Successful companies have to focus on the bottom line results (and rightly so). In times of perceived instability, generating revenue, either by increasing or decreasing expenditures, increasing sales volume, sales frequency, and margins is top priority.
Ask any CEO or senior level manager what their primary job function is, and they’ll generally answer with a resounding “to reach our financial objectives, create value in the eyes or our shareholders, meet our budgetary goals and turn a profit.”
In the final analysis, the people who hire you will not consider your marketing strategies “creative” unless they generate profitable sales and increase awareness (that leads to repeat business, increase compliancy, more grants or donors or changes in behavior) among targeted buyers.
Rather than using the number of awards you win or the number of non-buyers (people who are outside your target market) you impress as a success measurement, look at your ability to:
- lower cost of acquisition
- reduce distribution costs
- and to wrestle usage and loyalty from your direct and indirect competitors
This focus leads to the second question.
2. Did my sales and marketing efforts protect my organization and the people in it from becoming obsolete or irrelevant to our buyers?
Buyers are smart and fickle. They have thousands of choices, and want to own products and services purchased from credible, specialized organizations and people who are synonymous with excellence.
They want to realize specific outcomes made possible by using your products or services. They perceive your solution as a means to an end. You create and manage that perception through sound marketing. As a result, you have incredible power to determine your fate.
Great marketing – the kind that generates revenue – is the only protection against being viewed as a cost center. Keep your organization and its product relevant to buyers and you create a much more desirable position – profit center!
Enter the 4As
Over the years, I’ve researched best practices in virtually every industry and segment. During that time, I’ve developed a four-step definition of what makes a marketing campaign successful.
Don’t be fooled by its simplicity. Rather, use it as litmus against which you measure all marketing and sales initiatives you ever develop or observe.
Here are the processes:
1. Analyze - Marketing begins with analyzing and defining a qualified universe of potential users or buyers. Time needs to be earmarked to determine the drivers, emotional and logical needs, and traditional and psycho graphic nuances of the intended audience. This step allows focus and micro-segmentation and a significant decrease in marketing costs.
2. Attention - After this first phase in the marketing process, a true marketing effort succeeds in capturing the attention of the intended buyers within the targeted universe.
Once you’ve identified who the core prospect for your products or services is, you must take creative steps to get and maintain their attention.
3. Accept - Third, systematic effort must be put into getting the prospects to accept the concepts or propositions offered via the marketing effort. You must use the tools of copy, design, social networks, psychology and repetition to get the intended audience to accept that your solution is the best one to take.
This acceptance must take place despite the fact that your solution is just one of many options available in an increasingly saturated marketplace.
4. Action - Finally, with all three of the previous steps achieved, the marketer must convert the prospective buyer into an actual buyer by getting them to take the desired action (purchase, rent, call, download, subscribe, refer, sell, follow the law, become a member, etc.).
You must help the prospect to act on their acceptance of your proposition by doing whatever it is you want them to do.
Generally, this might be making one or more purchases (be sure your marketing strategy includes opportunities for buyers to evangelize their positive purchasing experiences to others). It may also be picking up a phone or responding to a direct mail offer or fundraising effort or petition drive.
Most importantly, you have to plan how to intend to stay involved with the customer so that they choose your solution again and again and again.
While most marketers have used the Ps of marketing (price, place, product, promotion) to develop their marketing plans, using the 4As – Analyze, Attention, Accept and Action makes more sense. Use the 4As to help determine and formulate the catalysts that lead to sales and revenue, which again, is the ultimate goal of any marketing effort.
These four components must be met (in chronological order) for your marketing to really be successful. These four steps ensure revenue, and marketing accountability. Used correctly and consistently, they result in measurable, traceable return on marketing investment.
A closer look at the 4As…
First Step, Analyze.
You have to analyze the needs of your audience. You need to be able to identify their core values, motivators, buying styles, fears, and sources of diversion, information channels and centers of influence.
You must target your marketing message so that the intended prospect feels that the services address their needs directly.
No buyer or buying population is alike. Try to apply a one size fits all approach to your marketing, and you become nothing special to anyone.
The era of mass marketing is dissipating. Customization, niching and micro-niching now reign. Your marketing efforts must create the ability for you to be the biggest fish in the smallest proverbial pond and remain profitable.
By isolating the smaller segments and targeting the best groups of buyers, you can increase response rates, generate higher levels of quality leads and ultimately dramatically decrease your cost of acquisition.
That’s why you have to create the perception that your goods exist with a specific niche or target audience in mind. When a prospect feels you know them, they are more likely to trust you and buzz your product within their own network of contacts
Better still; market as though you have one specific person in mind. You may only have one product or service, but you have to niche that product or service differently to different audiences, and segment your audiences in unique ways. Find out:
- Who has money (or who has spent money) on similar products or services?
- What are their beliefs and values?
- What are their desires, dreams and passions?
- What are their fears and secrets that they’d prefer to keep in the shadows?
- Where do they go on Mondays and Tuesdays and Wednesdays?
- Why do they buy what they buy?
This first step presents a critical opportunity for you and a major point of implosion for many marketers in every category. For the rest of the equation to work, you’ll have to earmark time to analyze the needs of your audience.
Second Step, Attention.
Once you’ve analyzed the needs of your best prospects and found out where they are you must then grab their attention.
That’s getting harder and harder to do. We bombard consumers with thousands of marketing message daily. What do they do to protect themselves? Filter them. Ignore them. Delete them. Fight back at them.
Rising above the landfill of marketing debris is yet another area in which this book will help you. For now, it’s important to note that you can’t be concerned with making everyone happy, or with trying to keep non-buyers from getting angry at your marketing efforts.
Focus exclusively on your buying universe and their environment. Your only concern must be getting the attention of your target audience.
In fact, upsetting a portion of the population makes a great strategy. Look at how polarizing films such as Mel Gibson’s the Passion of the Christ or Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911 or Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth were. They were polarizing enough to make each film a huge financial success!
Contrast is good. Where would Coca-Cola by without Pepsi? Republicans without Democrats? Hertz without Avis? Apple without the PC? The American Heart Association without the Tobacco Industry? God without Satan?
People like to take sides. While you know that most of life is about choosing which shade of gray is best suited for the moment, ambiguity and complexity rarely make good marketing tools.
You’re usually going to have a group of people in every market resentful towards your sales and marketing efforts. They or their actions will attempt to relegate sales and marketing professionals to third-class status.
Don’t let these individuals rob you of your passion, pride and creative spirit. Without sales and marketing, nothing happens. So don’t be shy or ashamed of your role in marketing.
You are the lifeblood of your organization. You can have everything else in place, but if you don’t have sufficient marketing, and revenue coming in, you’re going to end up closing your doors.
Don’t worry about the opinions of non-buyers or critics. These people just aren’t worth the energy and time investment it takes to convert them.
Instead, ask yourself and your entire staff questions that revolve around getting the attention of your defined universe of prospects.
- Where are our customers on a daily basis?
- What are they really looking at throughout the day?
- What is shocking, beautiful, humorous, emotional, frightening, and urgent enough for them to pay attention to our message and unique marketing proposition?
At this stage, brainstorm and develop some traditional and untraditional strategies to get and hold on to the attention of your target buyer with every marketing impression.
Be bold without losing sight of your core principles. Few organizations have ever succeeded by being plain vanilla.
Third Step, Accept.
Once you have their attention you move to the third step in the process, Accept. To succeed you’ll have to use every tool at your disposal to encourage and get the prospect to accept your proposition, no matter what it might be.
You have to get them to accept that your marketing proposition (despite the fact there might be countless other competitors in the marketplace right now) is the best one to help them achieve the outcomes they’re looking for.
As we’ll discuss in detail later, people do not buy products or services, they buy outcomes. You are in the outcomes business.
Your company, association, government agency, religious institution, online business, consultancy, or non-profit is merely a conduit that links people to the emotional, physical, spiritual and mental outcomes they crave.
In a world of dysfunctional families, dead end jobs, wars, pain, boredom, addictions, abuse, complacency and apathy, people seek escape, respect and salvation –something new!
Even if that escape is temporary, people will pay for it. Your goods provide a vehicle to get people what they want quickly. Talk about the outcomes not just the vehicle.
For instance, suppose you sell an intangible like visiting State parks. To market that park you’d have to shift your thinking to the results, the outcomes that a visitor wants to get by going to the park. You’d emphasize that:
- State parks are more than just a destination. Parks allow people to find a sacred space and carve out a sacred time for them to reconnect with their family.
- It’s an opportunity for them to reconnect with the earth. It’s a chance for them to escape the hustle and bustle.
- You’re providing a rare chance for them to feel what salvation and paradise on earth feels like.
That’s what you’re selling, not just a bunch of trees.
Consider accounting services. Why should a person or company use the services of an accounting firm when perfectly good software can do the task just as well, at a fraction of the cost?
- Because software can’t provide peace of mind.
- Because software still requires input and a knowledge that I don’t have time or desire to acquire.
- Because I want someone on my side who can protect me from fraudulent employees or unfair tax and accounting legislation.
- Because software programs use finite formulas and I might have a truly unique situation that only a qualified and trained accountant can exploit to my benefit.
- Finally, after a 12-hour workday, I want to be with my wife and not have to worry about whether all the financial tracks are covered, that’s what I can pay someone else to worry about.
Most people really want those outcomes. The product or service is simply a vehicle to expedite delivery of the ultimate outcomes. It’s the heart of marketing...delivery of outcomes valuable to the end user.
No product or service is valuable unless a person perceives it as worth paying for or giving something up to get. Although you control supply and demand or pay a spokesperson to claim that something is worth having, the consumer, not the producer ultimately determines value.
However, how often do you see, watch and hear marketers marketing to themselves, pounding their chests with bullet points and catchy slogans that talk about size, ego, and other worthless features that rarely connect to what the prospect wants? When the pontificating begins, prospects quickly shut off. They ignore the garbage marketing altogether.
Following the process, you’ve thoroughly analyzed your audience. You have momentarily captured their attention. The prospect has accepted that your solution might be the right one (better still, the only one) for themselves, their family or their company.
Fourth Step, Action.
You have to get them to act. The potential buyers have to do something with the information and relationship you’ve cultivated by taking a specific, intended course of action. They have to make the transition from tire kicker or prospect to a full-fledge customer/buyer/member/inductee.
Money or some other commitment has to take place to make your marketing efforts worthwhile.
Will it be a trip to your store, a phone call to set up an appointment or a visit to your website to order online? Will it be a completed survey, petition signature or membership renewal?
The value of forever
You can’t afford to settle for the single purchase. One purchase is seldom sufficient. Instead, great marketing professionals focus on the power of forever. FOREVER! Not just once, or twice or thrice, but repeated purchases that increase in terms of volume, frequency and profitability.
Focusing on your current customers is one of the simplest ways to keep your marketing expenses in check without negatively affecting sales growth. One of the reasons why businesses spend more money on marketing than necessary is excessive customer churn. The customer buys once and no systems exist to contact them again or move them to a repeat purchase, upgrade, addition or maintenance plan.
Alternatively, customers buy once and then run the opposite direction when the product isn’t what it was supposed to be or the buying experience was too painful.
You spend all that money to acquire the buyer, but you don’t follow through by delivering positively passionate customer service.
The newly acquired customer justifiably moves on to another vendor or solutions provider. Thanks to sloppy customer retention strategies, someone else gets them to accept that their proposition is better (which in light of your bad service isn’t too difficult).
Not only didn’t you manage your front end, but your ignored your back end (potential for future purchases and upgrades) too.
In fact, most marketers will tell you that they’re willing to break even, or even lose a few dollars on the first purchase, because ultimately, it’s not the first purchase that drives long-term growth.
What matters here is the repeat business, the lifetime value of every single customer.
For example, my friend Sara loves the taste of Starbucks Café Lattes. Sara goes to Starbucks at least once a day, and orders her Iced Venti Non-fat Café Latte with two Splendas™. Occasionally, she’ll treat herself to a chocolate biscotti.
On average, even in a supposed recession, Sara spends about five dollars a day. That’s $25 minimum a week, and at least $100 per month. Over the course of one year, she’ll have spent $1,200.00. After 10 years, she’ll have spent $12,000; at 30 years, it’s $36,000!
Do you think that Starbucks relishes Sara’s loyalty and figures the economic value of her loyalty into their marketing strategies?
Absolutely.
Now, multiply all the other Starbuck loyalists into the equation. What happens when you factor in the long-term economic value of everyone else just like Sara (According to Howard Shultz, CEO of Starbucks, the average “Sara” visits a Starbucks 18 times a month!)?
It’s not the one-time purchase, it’s the FOREVER value. When you go to Starbucks pay attention to the efforts put into creating the unique experience you’re treated to. If you’re a regular and even remotely sociable, the baristas probably know your name. They probably know exactly what you want.
On certain days, they probably have it waiting for you. They take care of you. Starbucks’ front-line staff is generally well trained. They create a consistent product. That consistency breeds some semblance of loyalty and repeat usage amongst a finicky, brand resistant segment. One that will pay $5.00 for a latte or chai if you deliver value.
“Can I get a witness!?”
A final thought to complete my 4A approach to marketing. One of your highest goals should be to get current prospects or current customers to “go yea into all the world” and evangelize the value of your products and services to other people.
Consider the trends.
Advertising and acquisition is only getting more expensive. And, less people and less qualified eyes are reading that very expensive advertising. Awareness without action is meaningless.
The task of resonating above the standard noise grows daunting. What messages people do receive through traditional marketing channels is rarely trusted. Skepticism has never been higher. Many people simply don’t believe what marketers claim.
Many people no longer respond to high-pressure sales and marketing approaches. They prefer honest, organic, unfiltered messages that don’t smack of a slick, pre-meditated marketing machine approach that tends to permeate the airwaves and printed pages of traditional media.
Given these realities, it makes financial sense to invest time, energy and deliberate planning on passive marketing. Passive marketing, also referred to as Buzz Marketing, Social Network Marketing, Consumer-to-Consumer Marketing, Word-of-Mouth Marketing, or Viral Marketing, is an ongoing process where a friend of a friend, of a friend, of a friend, of a friend recommends a product on your behalf.
These friends form social networks, which form communities, which form global hives that can transfer news at lightning speed, especially with the advent of email, blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, MySpace, Craigslist and on-demand meetings created through services like meetup.com.
People have always bartered and purchased based on their informal network of peer recommendations. However, when you consider the above trends, the urgency for marketing professionals to assist in creating systems that make it easier for customers to spread their positive purchasing experiences to others has never been higher.
What are you doing to make your give your marketing message passive, easy-to- forward and evangelize?
Plan for the systems by asking the following questions:
1. What doctrine is in place that gives customers something to believe in, spread to others and use as an anchor?
2. What can you do to help your customers communicate the virtues of your products or services to others effortlessly?
3. Where are your prospects looking? What spaces are they not looking at anymore? What information sources does your niche turn to for believable news and updates?
4. What channels of influencers exist to help spread your message organically and quickly?
5. What distribution channels can you jump over or bypass?
6. How can you distribute your marketing message through share and peer-to-peer networks?
7. What do customers get in return for leveraging their reputation by forwarding your message to their colleagues?
8. How conversational is your collateral?
9. How can you apply what’s working in other industries to generate buzz and authentic applause for your company? How can you translate that applause into tangible revenue?
All phases of the 4A approach to marketing must concentrate on mobilizing current databases to “go yea into the entire world” and evangelize the value of your products to other people. This shift in how organizations market and create awareness, attention and action is critical.
If you can’t mobilize your existing network of internal or external customers (and unconverted prospects) to tell everyone else about what ever it is you’re selling, expect an uphill battle.
It takes time, money, planning and action to market yourself, your products or services and your organization successfully. Still, spending a fortune or compromising your integrity is NOT required to produce successful marketing campaigns.
Brian Norris is the author of The Creative Sales and Marketing Manual. As a best-selling author and professional speaker, his work is read and his ideas are used by organizations across the globe. He also conducts marketing training programs and keynotes to assist other marketing and sales professionals to improve their best practices. Brian may be reached by emailing info@briannorris.com or calling 414-688-8252.